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MEDORA LEIGH; 



^ i^i^t^^'B ^^^^ ^^^ QVutobi0grapt)jj. 



EDITED BY 



CHARLES MACKAY. 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION, AND A COMMENTARY ON THE 

CHARGES BROUGHT AGAINST LORD BYRON 

BY MRS. BEECHER STOWE. 



'EX FUMO DARE LUCEM." 




/ 

NEW YORK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 
1870. 



PREFACE. 



The Editor of the following pages thinks it necessary, in order to prevent 
misconception, that he should explain in what manner and for what reasons 
he undertook to bring before the world the sad story of Medora Leigh, and 
to make his comments and observations upon it. A month or six weeks after 
the accusations brought a'gainst the memory of the illustrious poet by Mrs. 
Beecher Stowe — on the alleged authority and information of Lady Byron — 
he received a note from an acquaintance of his boyhood — a friend of thirty 
years' standing — requesting him to call upon him at his office on a matter of 
literary interest. He waited upon that gentleman as requested, and received 
from his hands the autobiography of Medora Leigh, daughter of the Hon, 
Augusta Leigh, Lord Byron's sister. His advice as to the publication of that 
narrative, and the documents that accompanied it, was solicited. The MSS. 
had lain undivulged and unheeded among his papers for twenty-six years, 
where they would possibly have remained in obscurity for ever — or been 
committed to the flames — had it not been for Mrs. Beecher Stowe's attack on 
Lord Byron's memory. The Editor's first impression, after a hasty perusal 
of the story, was that Medora Leigh might be an impostor. An attentive 
study of the autobiography and the accompanying documents removed that 
impression, and convinced him that, whatever and whoever else she might 
be, Medora Leigh was the undoubted daughter of Lord Byron's sister. His 
next impression was that, under all the circumstances, the suppression of the 
whole story — if it could be effected — was desirable. This course he at once 
recommended. The custodian of the papers — the gentleman into whose hands 
they had come at the time when he zealously but inefiectually endeavoured 
to bring about a reconciliation between Miss Leigh and her aunt. Lady Byron 
— objected to the destruction of the MSS., feeling convinced that the truth 
was the truth, and that its promulgation could do no hann except to the 
guilty, whomsoever they might be. The Editor several times w^ent over all 
the documents, and carefully compared the statements contained in them 
with those made by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, and with all the contributions to the 
perplexing story of Lord and Lady Byron's separation in 1816, which have 
gone the round of the newspapers and periodicals for the last three months. 
He came at last to the conclusion that they disproved all Mrs. Stowe's allega- 



iv PREFACE. 

tions relative to the year of the sepai-ation, and fixed the date of the first time 
when the charge was brought against Mrs. Leigh to the year 1831, seven 
years after Lord Byron's death, and of the charge against Lord Byron himself 
to the year 1840. He was also of opinion that he had discovered something 
like a clue to the authors of the scandal and to their motives. The result of 
his deliberations on the subject was the present Volume, where the reader 
will find an examination of the two stories of Mrs. Stowe and of Miss Leigh ; 
together with the reasons for his belief that the charge against Lord Byron's 
memory is not only unproved and unprovable, but untrue, and the result of 
a conspiracy in which Lady Byron had no part, but of which she was the dupe 
and the victim. 

December, 1869. 



PART I. 
INTRODUCTORY. 



THE STORY OF LORD AND LADY BYRON, AS RELATED BY 
MRS. STOWE. 



Whate'er my sins might be, thou wert not sent 

To be the Nemesis who should requite— 
Nor did Heaveu choose so near an instrument. 

Mercy is for the merciful !— if thou 

Hast been of such, 'twill be accorded now. 

Thy nights are banish'd from the realms of sleep !— 
Yes ! they may flatter thee, but thou shalt feel 
A hollow agony which will not heal. 

For thou art pillow'd on a curse too deep ; 

Thou hast sown in my sorrow, and must reap 
The bitter harvest in a woe as real ! 

I have had many foes, but none like thee. 

Lord B'jron. On hearing that Lady Buron was ill. 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



PART I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



Seldom has a man been more cordially praised 
or more bitterly blamed than Lord Byron. Dur- 
ing his brilliant and stormy, but too brief ca- 
reer, his name was continually in the mouths of 
men. His fame was not confined to his own 
country, but extended over two hemispheres, as 
that of the greatest, most powerfid, most origi- 
nal poet of his age. His admirers and his de- 
tractors were equally busy with the virtues and 
the failings of his character. The young, the 
sensitive, the hopeful,, the romantic of both sexes, 
ranged themselves enthusiastically upon his side, 
and gave themselves up unrestrainedly to the de- 
lirious fascination of his poetry ; while the old, 
the staid, the prosaic, and the cynical, though 
carried away by the current of public opinion so 
far as to admit the splendour of his genius, de- 
clared that he tm-ned it to evil account, and that 
the fire which burned and sparkled in his writ- 
ings was not the healthful caloric of Hea.ven, but 
the baneful and sulphurous flame from the ' 'other 
place." His fate was similar to that of his illus- 
trious predecessor. Lord Bacon. He was held 
to be among the greatest of men by his genius, 
and among the meanest by his vices. It cannot 
be said that either the admiration or the opposi- 
tion which his writings excited was unnatural. 
Their beauties were palpable, and shot with elec- 
trical force into hearts ready to receive and be 
stirred by them. On the other hand, he shock- 
ed so many prejudices, meddled with so many 
sacred subjects, in a manner that jarred upon the 
ears, and set upon edge the teeth of old-world or- 
thodoxy, both in faith and in politics, and unfurl- 
ed so boldly the revolutionary flag in an age that, 
although ripening, was not quite ripe enough for 
revolutionary action, that, even if his private 
character had been white as the untrodden snow 
upon the summits of the Himalayas, and he had 
been that "faultless monster" who was spoken 
of by a great poet of a previous age as one whom 
the world never saw, Calumny would, neverthe- 
less, have fixed her dirty claws upon him, and in- 
vented crimes with which to bespatter his reputa- 
tion. The people of this more tolerant age can 
scarcely understand the enmities which he ex- 
cited, any more than they can share the extraor- 
dinary enthusiasm evoked by his poems when 



they first appeared. In Byron's age poetry was 
written for men and women ; in ours, if not writ- 
ten- for schoolgirls, it falls unheeded from the 
press. Nevertheless, his poetic fame has come 
down to us unsuUied from our fathers, and his 
works remain to us — the imperishable records of 
a mighty, if a wayward, genius. At his early 
death — scarcely in middle manhood — when the 
effervescent exuberance of his youthful intellect 
and imagination was just beginning to mellow 
into " drink divine," his place was permanently 
fixed in our national Walhalla. There he stands, 
and will continue to stand as long as our lan- 
guage endures, second only to Shakespeare and 
Milton, and far above the Chancers, the Spensers, 
the Drydens, and the Popes — far also above all 
his contemporaries. Sir Walter Scott alone ex- 
cepted. 

It is true that long after his untimely death 
the breath of slander continued to sully his name. 
Much dirt had been flung at him, and some of it 
had stuck ; but the imputations against him were 
gradually growing less and less distinct. His 
name was less and less in the path of the world's 
memory and the -world's passions, till it seemed 
as if nothing were wanting but the beneficent 
touch of Time to remove the last speck, real or 
imaginary, that dimmed the brightness of his 
glory. The world has long since ceased to hear 
of the errors, the follies, and the vices of Shake- 
speare, if he had any — which is certainly as 
probable as it is possible. There are no stories, 
Heaven be praised ! about Mrs. Shakespeare, or 
the second-best bed, which her lord left her by 
will, out of which to manufacture lies for the 
gratification of the evil-minded and the poor of 
soul, who love to believe that the greatest of men 
would probably rank among the smallest, if Mrs. 
Grundy only knew all about them. Milton's fame 
is not attacked on account of any of the Mistress- 
es Milton ; and even the amours of Robert Burns 
among the fair serving-lasses of Dumfries and 
Ayrshire have ceased to afford pabulum for the 
voracious maw of the Slander that loves to feed 
upon the peccadilloes no less than upon the 
graver offences of the intellectually great. And 
there was a hope that the illusti-ious Byron might 
be left in his grave, alone in his glory, with none 
to rake up the ashes of his fiery youth — to pry 
into his faults with microscopic ej-e, and hold up 
his memory to pubhc shame. 



8 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



Unluckily, however, this was not to be. There 
came to England, in 1852-3, an American, one 
whom the Americans themselves call a Yankee 
— an ultra- Yankee — Mrs. Harriet BeecherStowe, 
who had rendered her name familiar to all the 
English-speaking people of the world by a sensa- 
tional novel, semi -political, semi - religious, en- 
titled "Uncle Tom's Cabin," of which the objects 
appeared to be the apotheosis of the negro (or, 
as her countrymen call him, the "nigger"), and 
the defamation of the slaveowners of the South- 
ern States of the American Union, for holding 
the blacks in bondage. It is true that the aboli- 
tion of slavery involved, in the course of time, 
the possible abolition of the negro. But this was 
nothing to a professional philanthropist. The 
work excited an extraordinary sensation both in 
America and in Great Britain. In America its 
gross exaggerations, no less than its positive false- 
hoods, exasperated the whole white population of 
tlie South, greatly offended the Conservative or 
Democratic party of the North, and was received 
with shouts of joy and welcome only by the small 
but earnest and grim party of Puritans and ultra- 
Republicans of New England, who had made up 
their minds that slaveiy should be abolished, i^er 
fas aut nefas, and who were prepared, as thej^ 
asserted then, and for years previously and sub- 
sequently, to break up the Union, rather than 
submit to the monstrous evil of being participa- 
tors in a Government that recognised slavery — 
the " sum of all villanies" — as legal in any por- 
tion, however small, of its vast domain. In Great 
Britain, where a negro is rarely seen, and where 
the antipathy of race, as it exists in America 
against both the red and the black man, is un- 
known for want of objects of contact, the quasi- 
novel was widely read by classes who never read 
ordinary romances, and look upon them as idle 
and worthless, if not as profane and mischievous 
productions. It was a novelty, and hit the taste 
of the moment, though it has now sunk into an 
oblivion from which it is not likely ever again to 
be extricated. Lady Byron was an earnest and 
sincere behever in the guilt and wrong of slavery 
—was what the Americans call a nigger-worship- 
per ; and when William and Ellen Crafts, two 
fugitive slaves fi-om the Southern States, sought 
and found refuge in London, they were " fos- 
tered," says Mrs. Stowe, "under Lady Byron's 
patronising care." An intimacy sprang up be- 
tween the two ladies on the anti-slavery and ne- 
gro question— the chief, though by no means the 
only, sympathetic bond between them. They 
were both literaiy ; both what used to be called 
"blues;" both professional philanthropists ; both 
strong-minded women ; both celebrated, though 
in very diflTerent ways ; and of tastes, and modes 
of looking at men and things, and at the world 
in general, that seem to have been remarkably 
congenial. The intimacy thus formed soon ex- 
panded into an ardent friendship, such as com- 



monly occurs only among gushing young ladies 
who think that they have suffered long at the 
hands of the other sex, or who look doAvn upon 
that sex with philosophic contempt from the 
lofty pedestal of moral virtue to which they im- 
agine that they have clambered. When Mrs, 
Stowe returned to her own coimtry, after a brief 
visit, full of "Sunny Memories," which after- 
wards found fame and profit in a book, a cor- 
respondence was kept up between the friends. 
On the second visit of the American authoress 
to London the intimacy was renewed, and she 
learned more and more to love the celebrated and 
philanthropic lady, the sorrows of whose early 
wedded life and widowhood had long been the 
theme of the world's wonder or pity for more 
than a quarter of a century. Mrs. Stowe was a 
hero-worshipper, as far as related to Lady Byron, 
and saw in her the incarnation of all that was 
gentle, beautiful, amiable, and divine in woman. 
She thus describes her as she appeared to her 
eyes in 1856 :* 

"Lady Byron, though slight and almost in- 
fantine in her bodily presence, had tlie soul not 
only of an angelic woman, but of a strong reason- 
ing man. Among all with whom the writer's 
experience brought her into connection in En- 
gland, there was none who impressed her so 
strongly as Lady Byron. There was an almost 
supernatural poiver of moral divination, a grasp 
of the very highest and most comprehensive 
things, that made her lightest opinion singularly 
impressive. 

''^ Never has more divine strength of faith and 
love existed in woman (than in Lady Byron). 
Out of the depths of her own loving and merciful 
nature she gained such views of the Divine love 
and mercy as made all hopes possible. . . . She 
never doubted her husband's salvation. There 
was no soul of whose future she despaired. Such 
was her boundless faith in the redeeming power 
of Love. ... To talk with her seemed to the 
writer the nearest possible approach to talk with 
one of the spirits of the just made perfect. 

"She was gentle, artless, approachable as a 
little child ; with ready outflowing sympathy for 
the cares, and sorrows, and interests of all who 
approached her ; with a na'ive and gentle playful- 
ness, that adorned without hiding the breadth 
and strength of her mind ; and, above all, with a 
clear divining moral discrimination, never mis- 
taking wrong for right in the slightest shade, yet 
with a mercifulness that made allowance for ev- 
ery weakness, and pitied every sin. 

''''There was so much of Christ in her, that to 
have seen her seemed to have been drawn near to 
Heaven ! She was one of those few friends from 
whom absence cannot divide — whose mere pres- 
ence in this world seems always a help to every 



* " The True Story of Lady Byron's Married Life" 
{Macmillan's Magazine, September, 18G9). 



INTRODUCTOEY. 



generous thought, a strength to every good pm-- 
pose, a comfort in every sorrow. 

"/S^e lived so nearly on the confines of the 
spiritual world that she seemed, ivhile living, al- 
ready to see into it. 

" We" (Mrs. Stowe) " have already spoken of 
that singular sense of the reality of the spiritual 
world, which seemed to encompass Lady Byron 
during the last part of her life, and which made 
her words and actions seem more like those of a 
blessed being, detached from earth, than of an or- 
dinary mortal ! All her modes of looking at 
things, all her motives of action, all her involun- 
tary exhibitions of emotion, were so high above 
any common level, and so entirely regulated by 
the most unworldly causes, that it would seem 
diflicult to make the ordmary world understand 
exactly how they seemed to lie before her mind. 
What impressed the writer more strongly than 
anything else was Lady Byron's perfect convic- 
tion that her husband was now a redeemed spir- 
it : that he looked back with pain, shame, and 
regret on all that was unworthy in his past life ; 
and that, if he could speak or could act in the 
case, he would desire to prevent the circulation of 
further base ftalsehoods, and of seductive poetry, 
Avhich had been made the vehicle of morbid and 
unworthy passions. 

' ' While speaking on this subject'' ( the redemp- 
tion of Lord Byron's soul) "her pale ethereal 
face became luminous with a heavenly radiance. 
There was something so sublime in her belief of 
the victory of Love over Evil, that Faith with her 
seemed to have become Sight. 

"Lady Byron was the most remarkable wom- 
an that England has produced in this cen- 
tury." 

Such was Lady Byron, in 1856, to the eye and 
fancy of the authoress of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." 
To Mrs. Stbwe, her friend was not only a ne- 
grophilist, a spiritualist, and a universalist, but 
the most angelic and most perfect of women and 
of human beings. The natures of the seraphim 
who know most, and of the cherubim who love 
most, were, in Mrs. Stowe's imagination, blended 
together in the sweet human nature of her friend. 
We need not pause to weigh the powers of Mrs. 
Stowe as a limner of character. No doubt Lady 
Byron shone, in her mind, with all the supernal 
glow of colour with which she depicted her excel- 
lences — a fact which may leave the good faith of 
the limner undisputed, without compelling the 
less enthusiastic or bewildered onlooker to regard 
the portrait as faithful. All the world agreed, in 
Lady Byron's lifetime — even her unhappy hus- 
band never disputed the fact — that she was a 
good woman. She was never accused of any 
crime, of any vice, even of any great or particu- 
lar failing. The worst that was ever said of her 
was that she was cold and unsympathetic ; and 
that, had she been less cold and more sympa- 
thetic, her erring husband might have been 



converted into as good a husband as he was 
a poet. This verdict has never been reversed — 
never was sought to be reversed— until Mrs. 
Stowe thrust (we must think without the slight- 
est authority or justification) the story of Lady 
Byron's wedded life before the world, and chal- 
lenged its belief in a story that, even if it were 
true, ought never to have been told ; and that, if 
false, would prove the narrator (if Lady Byron 
told it as Mrs. Stowe tells it) to be either the vic- 
tim of an extraordinary hallucination, or of a 
conspiracy of others to deceive her. If neither 
of these, she was the author of the story herself. 
W'hether tme or fiilse, the stoiy was divulged 
unnecessarily by Mrs. Stowe, and for a reason 
that was and could be no justification. Lady 
Byron M-as, in the year 185G— if we are to credit 
Mrs. Stowe — brought to believe, in some myste- 
rious manner, that although she had kept silence 
no less than for forty years on the subject of her 
separation from her husband, and of the "crime" 
which he had committed against her, against 
man, and against God (such it was represented 
to be, whatever was its specific name), that the 
time had come when it was necessary to tell the 
whole truth — not for the sake of truth, if Mrs. 
Stowe is to be believed, but with the object of 
stopping the sale, or at all events of diminishing 
the popularity, of Lord Byron's poems, many 
cheap editions of which, in consequence of the 
expiry of Mr. Murray's copyright and other 
causes, were issuing from the press ! This pal- 
try, this mean, unworthy justification, cannot' be 
accepted as sufficient for the publication of so 
hideous a story. Would any sane person at- 
tempt to prevent the publication of the Psalms 
of David — wrung from the agony of a contrite 
and remorseful heart — because David committed 
an awful crime when he sent Uriah, the man 
whose wife he coveted and seduced, to perish in 
the front of the battle, well knowing, artd intend- 
ing, that he would there be killed ? " Or, coming 
down to a later period, would any reasonable be- 
ing endeavour to stop the circulation of " Tarn 
o'Shanter," " The Cotter's Saturday Night," and 
"A Man's a Man for a' that," because the in- 
continence of Robert Burns was a scandal to his 
neighbourhood during his lifetime? The "an- 
gelic" Lady Byron, aggi-ieved by the popularity 
of her husband's poems — especially by the cheap 
editions — was, if Mrs. Stowe did not misunder- 
stand and has not misrepresented her, moved to 
tell, for the first time in her life, the great and 
fearful secret which she had carried about Mith 
her for forty years. The circumstances under 
which Mrs. Stowe was selected, out of all the 
persons in the wide world, to be her confidante, 
are better told in Mrs. Stowe's own words than 
they would be in any r^sum^ by another pen.* 
They are as follow : — 



* "The True Story of Lady Byron's Married Life" 
(Macmillan's Magazine, September, 18G9). 



10 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



"On the occasion of a second visit to En- 
gland, in 1856, the writer received a note from 
Lady Byron, indicating that she wished to have 
some private confidential conversation upon im- 
portant subjects, and inviting her for that pur- 
pose to spend a day \vith her at her country-seat 
near London. 

' ' The writer went and spent a day with Lady 
Byron alone, and the object of the visit was ex- 
plained to her. Lady Byron was in such a state 
of health that her physicians had warned her that 
she had very little time to live. She was engaged 
in those duties and reviews which every thought- 
ful person finds necessary, who is coming delib- 
erately and with open eyes to the boundaries of 
another life. 

:ic * 4c 4: 4: 

" As Lady Byron's whole life had been passed 
in the most heroic self-abnegation and self-sacri- 
fice, the question was now proposed to her, wheth- 
er one more act of self-denial was not required 
of her before leaving this world — namely, to de- 
clare the absolute truth, no matter at what ex- 
pense to her own feelings ? 

" For this pui-pose, it was her desire to recount 
the whole history to a person of another country, 
and entirely out of the whole sphere oi personal 
and local feelings, which might be supposed to 
influence those in the country and station in life 
where the events really happened, in oijder that 
she might be helped by such a person's views in 
making up an opinion as to her own duty. 

" The interview had almost the solemnity of a 
deathbed avowal. Lady Byron recounted the 
histoiy which has been embodied in this article, 
and gave to the writer a paper containing a brief 
memorandum of the whole, with the dates aflSx- 
ed." 

The various charges which the ethereal lady — 
so gentle — so placid — so near akin to the angels 
in heaven — speaking, as Mrs. Stowe says, "with 
almost the solemnity of a deathbed avowal," 
brought against her husband, who had been two- 
and-thirty years in his grave, amounted, as we 
gather from the rambling, confused, and very an- 
achronistical statement of Mrs. Stowe, to no less 
than nine, which Ave shall disinter seriatim from 
the mass of verbiage in which they occur : — 

First. On offering marriage to Miss Milbanke 
(afterwards Lady Byron) for the first time, and 
being refused by her, with many expressions of 
friendship and interest, Lord Byron took the re- 
fusal so much to heart, that during the two years 
ensuing he carried his affections elsewhere — be- 
stowed them upon a married woman — that wom- 
an his own sister ! " From the height, " says 
Mrs. Stowe, "which might have made him the 
happy husband of a noble woman" had Miss Mil- 
banke accepted him (Mrs. Stowe must mean this, 
though she does not say so) — "he fell into the 
depths of a secret adulterous intrigue Avith a blood- 



relation, so near in consanguinity that discovery 
must have been utter ruin and expulsion from 
civilised society. From henceforth his damning 
guilty secret became the ruling force in his life, 
holding him with a morbid fascination, yet filling 
him with remorse and anguish, and insane dread 
of detection," 

After two years of this kind of life, as Mrs. 
Stowe informs us, his friends, seeing him unhap- 
py, and not knowing the cause, pressed upon him 
to marry. He took the advice, again pi-oposed 
to Miss Milbanke, and was this time accepted. 
The question arises : How did Lady Byron know 
this fact — if fact it were ? Who told her ? It 
could not be either of the two parties to the un- 
holy intrigue, Avhich was so little suspected at the 
time by the party most intimately concerned, the 
husband of the incriminated lady, that he lived 
happily with her for many years, until his death, 
and had four children by her — in addition to the 
three which he possessed at the time — which, if 
it were two years before Lord Byron's marriage, 
must have been in 1813 and 1814. 

Lady Byron certainly did not know anything 
of this dreadful story at the time, or she would 
scarcely have married Lord Byron, On this 
point Mrs. Stowe — speaking, as alleged, at Lady 
Byron's dictation, and with her authority — is suf- 
ficiently clear: "When he" (Lord Byron, after 
being accepted as the young lady's future hus- 
band) "went to visit Miss Milbanke's parents, 
she was struck with his manner and appearance. 
She saw him moody and gloomy, evidently wrest- 
ling with dark and desperate thoughts, and any- 
thing but what a happy and accepted lover should 
be. She sought an interview with him alone, 
and told him she had observed that he Avas not 
happy in the engagement ; and magnanimouih/ 
added, that if, on revicAv, he found he had been 
mistaken in the nature of his feelings, she Avould 
immediately release him, and they should remain 
only as friends. Overcome Avith the conflict of 
his feelings. Lord Byron fainted aAvay ! Miss 
Milbanke was convinced that his heart must real- 
ly be deeply involved in an attachment with ref- 
erence to Avhich he shoAved such strength of emo- 
tion ; and she spoke no more of the dissolution 
of the engagement." 

It folloAvs indubitably from this statement, if a 
true one, which it very likely is, that before her 
marriage the future Lady BjTon neither knew 
nor suspected the incestuous and adulterous con- 
nection specified by Mrs. StOAve. 

Second. A charge of brutality is brought 
against Lord Byi-on : of brutality at a time Avhen 
a man Avith the most ordinary feelings of man- 
hood — even of a boor and a clodhopper, much 
more of a gentleman and scholar — would have 
been particularly gentle to a lady Avhom he had 
a fcAV minutes before accepted at the altar as his 
bride. "The moment," says Mrs. Stowe, "the 
carriage-doors Avere shut upon the bridegroom 



INTRODUCTORY. 



11 



and bride, the paroxysm of remorse and despair 
— unrepenting remorse and angry despair — broke 
forth upon her gentle head. ' You might have 
spared me this, Madam ; you had all in your owti 
power when I offered to you first. Then you 
might have made me what you pleased. Now 
you will find that you have married a devil!' " 
If Lady B}Ton told Mrs. Stowe this, and believed 
it, she must have had a marvellous conceit of the 
mischief she had done in first rejecting the man 
whom she afterwards accepted, and a correspond- 
ingly high appreciation of her own great powers 
and merits. But the whole story partakes too 
strongly of the skill of the romancist and of the 
sensation-monger, and shows too much of the art 
apparent in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to be accept- 
ed as Lady Byron's story as told by herself. Be- 
sides, it is contradicted, before it was heard, by 
Lord Byron himself, who owns that he was some- 
what vexed and annoyed on finding, when he got 
into the carriage with his bride, that a lady's-maid 
had been stuck in betv/een them. Possibly Lord 
Byron's annoyance on the occasion, to which he 
very good-naturedly and good-humouredly refer- 
red in a letter written at the time to his not very 
judicious friend, Thomas Moore, might be ex- 
plained on the very innocent and very natm-al 
supposition, that the bridegroom would have liked 
to have put his arms round his bride's waist, and 
given the conjugal kiss of strong affection which 
he had just been privileged to bestow upon her, 
and which he had too much delicacy of mind to in- 
dulge in before a third person, even if that person 
had been a lady instead of a domestic serv^ant. 
Third. The adulterous and incestuous connec- 
tion, commenced before marriage, brought about 
by Miss Milbanke's first refusal — as Mrs. Stowe 
would have the world believe — was continued aft- 
er marriage. "There came," she says (but she 
does not inform us how, or from whence it came), 
' ' an hour of revelation — an hour when, in a man- 
ner which left no kind of room for doubt. Lady 
Byron saw the full depth of the abyss of infamy 
which her marriage was expected to cover, and 
understood that she was expected to be the cloak 
and the accomplice of tliis infamy. Many wom- 
en would have been utterly crushed by such a dis- 
closure ; some Avould have fled from him imme- 
diately, and exposed and denounced the crime. 
Lady Byron did neither. When all the hope of 
womanhood died out of her heart, there arose 
within her, stronger, purer, and brighter, that im- 
mortal kind of love such as God feels for the sin- 
ner — the love of which Jesus spoke, that makes 
the one wanderer of more account than the ' nine- 
ty-and-nine that went not astray.' She would 
neither leave him nor betray him, nor yet would 
she for one moment justify his sin. And hence 
came tico years of convulsive struggle, in which 
sometimes, for a while, the good angel seemed to 
gain the ground, and then the evil one returned 
with sevenfold vehemence." 



As Lord and Lady Byi-on only lived for thir- 
teen months together, the " two years" of this re- 
markable charge, made by a living woman against 
a dead man's memory, must be taken as a proof 
of carelessness on the part of the narrator — sug- 
gestive not alone of carelessness in this one re- 
spect, but of possible inaccuracy in others. If 
the story be true. Lady Byron, in condoning such 
a sin, must have been a person of superhuman 
coldness and absence of passion — a pure abstrac- 
tion, without any of the loveable human weak- 
ness that even when wrong takes all of us who 
are worth taking out of the line of geometry and 
mathematics, and vindicates our possession of 
blood and feelings. 

Fourth. Lord Byron having committed, and 
being determined to continue to commit, this sin, 
endeavored to undermine the faith of his long- 
suffering and most forgiving lady in the doctrines 
of Christianity in which she had been nurtured, 
and to which she hopefully clung. ' ' Lord By- 
ron," says Mrs. Stowe, "argued his case (incest 
and adultery), -with himself and with her, with 
all the sophistries of his powerful mind. He re- 
pudiated Christianity as an authority, and as- 
serted the right of every human being to follow 
out what he called the impulses of nature. Sub- 
sequently" (in 1821 — five years and more after 
his separation from his wife) "he introduced into 
one of his dramas (Cain) the reasoning by which 
he justified himself in incest." This charge, as 
regards the dramatic poem of "Cain," whether 
made by Lady B^Ton or Mrs. Stowe, is almost 
too monstrous for comment. If poets are to be 
accused of the crimes which they depict (and in 
the case of Cain and Adah the incest Mas not in- 
cest, inasmuch as Adah was the only man-iage- 
able woman in the world, except Eve, his moth- 
er, at the time when Cain espoused her), Shake- 
speare must be considered a murderer, and Mil- 
ton a blasphemer. 

Fifth. Having failed to undeimine and destroy 
her religious convictions, Lord Byron endeavour- 
ed to corrupt his wife's morals, so as to induce 
her to wink at, or prudently ignore, the sins 
which he was determined to commit. "His first 
attempt, " says Mrs. Stowe, ' ' had been to make 
Lady Byron his accomplice : by sophistry, by de- 
stroying her faith in Christianity, and confusing 
her sense of right and wrong, to bring her into 
the ranks of those convenient women who regard 
the marriage tie only as a friendly alliance to 
cover license on both sides. When he described 
to her the continental latitude — the good-hu- 
moured man-iages, in which complaisant couples 
mutually agree to form the cloak for each other's 
infidelities, and gave her to understand that in 
this way alone she coidd have a peaceful and 
friendly life with him — she answered him sim- 
ply, 'I am too truly your friend to do this.' "^ 
Supposing this charge to be true — of which there 
is no proof except Mrs. Stowe 's assertion, unless 



12 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



Lady Byron has left it in a document which can 
be produced — what becomes of that angeUc char- 
ity wliich thinks no evil, and repeats none, for 
which Lady Byron is so enthusiastically praised 
by her romantic confidante ; and with what pur- 
pose was such a charge disinterred from the grave 
of hira who could not answer ? 

Sixth. "When Lord Byron found that he had 
to do with one who would not yield — who knew 
him fully, who could not be blinded, and would 
not be deceived — he determined to rid himself 
of her altogether." If Lady Byron's assertion, 
made to Mrs. Stowe forty years after the event, 
be good for anything. Lord Byron's assertion, 
made immediately after the event, and repeated, 
in and out of season, at every convenient oppor- 
tunity during the eight years that he lived after 
the separation, ought certainly to count for as 
much, and to be fairly weighed in the balance 
of evidence. Byron's account of the separation 
bears all the impress of contemporaneous truth 
and sinceiity ; Lady Byron's (or Mrs. Stowe's) 
that of an afterthought, colored and distorted by 
the feelings and prejudices of the interval. If 
Lord Byron drove his lady away from him — of 
which there is not a particle of proof — he earn- 
estly, penitently, solemnly, and affectionately 
urged her to return to him. The proofs of this 
ai-e manifold and overwhelming, and Lady By- 
ron, when alive, never ventured to deny them. 

Seventh. A renewed charge of "unmanly bru- 
tality" to a weak and suffering woman, to whom 
he was bound by the holiest and tenderest ties. 
" It was," says Mrs. Stowe, "when the state of 
affairs between Lady Byron and her husband 
seemed darkest and most hopeless, that the only 
child of their union was born. Lord Byron's 
treatment of his lady during the sensitive period 
that preceded the birth of his child, and during 
her confinement, was marked by paroxysms of 
unmanly brutality, for which the only charity on 

her part was the supposition of insanity 

A day or two after the birth of this child. Lord 
Byron came suddenly into Lady Byron's room, 
and told her that her mother was dead. It was 
an utter falsehood, but it was a specimen of the 
many nameless injuries and cruelties by which he 
expressed his hatred of her." If these allega- 
tions were true, and Lady BjTon accounted for 
such aberrations from the line of gentlemanly, 
and even of human behaviour, towards a lady in 
her delicate position, by the allegation of insani- 
ty, it is scarcely consistent with the angelic char- 
acter given to Lady Byron by her friend Mrs. 
Stowe, that she should mention such charges to 
his injury after the lapse of forty years. 

Eighth. This charge, though reproduced by 
Mrs. Stowe, was not originally made by her, but 
by Lady Byron herself, in a letter to Thomas 
Moore, who had submitted to her, in 1830, the 
proof-sheets of his "Life of Byron," and request- 
ed to know if she had any remark to make upon 



passages referring to herself. In this letter she 
says — speaking of the inexplicable separation of 
181 G, and six years after Byron's death : — 

"The facts are: I left London for Kirkby- 
Mallory, the residence of my father and mother, 
on the 15th of Januaiy, 1816. Lord Byron 

HAD SIGNIFIED TO ME IN WRITING, JANUARY 
GtH, HIS ABSOLUTE DESIRE THAT I SHOULD 

LEAVE London on the earliest day that I 
COULD conveniently FIX. It was not safe for 
me to undertake the fatigue of a journey sooner 
than the 15th. Previously to my departure, it 
had been strongly impressed upon my mind that 
Lord Byron was under the influence of insanity. 
This opinion was derived in a great measure from 
the communications made me by his nearest rel- 
atives and personal attendant, who had more op- 
portunity than myself for observing him during 
the latter part of my stay in town. It was even 
represented to me that he was in danger of de- 
stroying himself. 

'■'■With the concurrence of his faint 1 1/, I had 
consulted Dr. Baillie as a friend, January 8th, 
respecting the supposed malady. On acquaint- 
ing him with the state of the case, and with Lord 
Byron's desire that I should leave London, Dr. 
Baillie thought that my absence might be advis- 
able as an experiment, assuming the fact of men- 
tal derangement ; for Dr. Baillie, not having had 
access to Lord Byron, could not pronounce a pos- 
itive opinion on that point. He enjoined that, in 
correspondence with Lord Byron, I should avoid 
all but light and soothing topics. Under these 
impressions I left London, determined to follow 
the advice given by Dr. Baillie. Whatever might 
have been the conduct of Lord Byi-on towards 
me from the time of my marriage, yet, supposing 
him to be in a state of mental alienation, it was 
not for 7ne, nor for any person of common hu- 
manity, to manifest at that moment a sense of 
injury." 

Mrs. Stowe appends to this extract— the main 
fact stated in which (Lady Byron's expulsion) is 
denied by the whole tenor of Lord Byron's cor- 
respondence and conversations with his friends 
and acquaintances, and constantly reiterated by 
him, that Lady Byron left him, he knew not why, 
with a promise to return, which she did not keep 
— her opinion, that "nothing more than this let- 
ter from Lord BjTon is necessary to substantiate 
the fact, that she did not leave her husband, but 
was driven from him." She adds the utterly 
gratuitous allegation, that he expelled her in or- 
der that "he might follow out the guilty infiitu- 
ation that was consuming him, without being 
tortured by her imploring fiice, and by the silent 
power of her presence and her prayers in his 
house. " 

In connection with this charge — that Lord 
Byron gave her notice to quit nine days before 



INTRODUCTORY. 



13 



she finally departed, M'ith full knowledge of Lord 
Byron's crime — how is the world to understand 
the following passage in Mrs. Stowe's own story? 

' ' Only a few days before Lady Byron left him 
for ever, Lord Byron sent Mmray manuscripts, in 
Lady Byron's handwriting, of the ' Siege of Co- 
rinth' and ' Barisina,' and wrote : — 

" 'I am very glad that the handwriting was a 
favourable omen of the morale of the piece ; but 
you must not trust to that, for my copyist would 
write out anything I desired, in all the ignorance 
of innocence. ' " 

This does not look like the action of a woman 
driven away against her will by her husband ; but 
very like, it seems to us, the action of a woman 
who was playing a part, who did not wish to 
arouse her husband's suspicions — but w'ho, being 
resolved to leave him, deceived him to the last 
moment, by the display of innocent affection, and 
sympathy with his literary pursuits. 

Ninth. This is the crowning charge, and for 
the first time brings Lady Byron face to face 
with her husband and his alleged paramour and 
sister, the Hon. Augusta Leigh. "On the day 
of her departure" (when she says she was driven 
away, and when Lord Byron says she went away 
of her own free will, with a falsehood upon her 
lips), "she passed," as Mrs. Stowe informs us, 
" by the door of his room, and stopped to caress 
his favourite spaniel, which was lying there; and 
she confessed to a friend the weakness of feeling 
a willingness even to be something as humble as 
that poor little creature, might she only be al- 
lowed to remain and watch over him. She went 
into the room where he and the partner of his sins 
were sitting together, and said, ' Byron, I come 
to say good-bye,' offering at the same time her 
hand. Lord Byron put his hands behind him, 
retreated to the mantelpiece, and, looking round 
on the two that stood there, with a sarcastic 
smile, said, 'When shall we three meet again?' 
Lady Byron answered: 'In heaven, I trust.' 
And those were her last words to him on earth." 
If this bit of romance could be accepted as 
true (Lord Byron's dog, by the way, not a little 
spaniel, but a large and powerful animal, familiar 
by description to all the readers of his Life and 
Letters), Lady Byron, by her own and Mrs. 
Stowe's showing, was so meek, so spiritless, so 
abject, so stupidly forgiving, so unconscious of 
the respect due to herself and to the outraged 
laws of God and man, that she preferred to be a 
dog sleeping at the door of an incestuous adul- 
terer, rather than an honest and outraged wom- 
an, leaving the adulterer's presence, with forgive- 
ness, perhaps, in her heart, but with disapproval, 
if not scorn, in her mind. This is not a flatter- 
ing picture to draw of Lady Byron, but it is Mrs. 
Stowe who has drawn it. 

These nine charges, however distinct as they 



may appear, all resolve themselves into a cluster 
around the one great and fearful charge, that two 
years before, and during the whole of his wedded 
life until its close, on Lady Byron's departure 
from his roof, never again to return, Lord Byron 
was guilty of incest with a married lady, whom 
Mrs. Stowe does not name, but who is distinctly 
pointed at, and can be, and means no other, than 
his father's daughter, his half-sister, the Hon. 
Augusta Leigh. Of this incestuous and adulter- 
ous crime. Lady Byron, it appears, told Mrs. 
Stowe in 185G, thirty-two years after her hus- 
band's death, that there was issue, one child, a 
daughter. Again, to prevent involuntary injus- 
tice to Mrs. Stowe, we quote her own words : — 
"There was," she says, "an unfortunate child 
of sin, born with the curse upon her, over whose 
wayward nature Lady Byron watched with a 
mother's tenderness. She was the one who could 
have patience when the patience of every one else 
failed ; and though the task was a difficult one, 
from the strange abnormal propensities to evil in 
the subject of it, yet Lady Byron never faltered, 
and never gave over till death took the responsi- 
bility from her hands." Though this might have 
been the child of some other sin, and not the is- 
sue either of incest or of adulteiy, it has been 
taken by all readers to mean the child of Lord 
Byron and his sister ; and it is clearly Mrs. 
Stowe's meaning so to consider and represent 
it ; and to depict the more than mortal — the 
heavenly Christian charity of Lady Byron, in 
taking notice of, and acting a mother's part to- 
wards it. On this point, the strange and mel- 
ancholy history of Medora Leigh, to be subfe- 
quently related in these pages, will throw addi- 
tional light. Meanwhile let us proceed with 
Mrs. Stowe, as the denunciator of Lord Byron, 
to learn, if possible — supposing that she be the 
fiiithful reporter of the sad story which Lady By- 
ron confided to her ear, and fell into no misun- 
derstanding of Lady Byron's words or meaning 
— on what impulse, and by what authority, she 
unfolded to the world an accusation against the 
dead, and of which no living man or woman was 
able to establish the truth. Mrs. Stowe shall 
tell us. She expected that, when Lady Byron 
died in 1 860, four years after she had become the 
confidante of her great wrongs, and her, till then, 
unuttered and unutterable sorrows, that some one 
would have come forward in Lady Byron's behalf 
with a memoir of her life, setting forth her true 
character and the exact facts of her story. No 
such memoir appeared. Nevertheless Mrs. Stowe 
still waited and hoped, though labouring with the 
weight of a secret apparently much too weighty 
for her to bear. At last, the Countess of Guic- 
cioli, widow of the eccentric Marquis de Boissy, 
who was very fond of individual Englishmen, but 
detested, with a fantastic as well as fanatical ha- 
tred, the collective British nation and its Govern- 
ment, published, in the early summer of I SCO, 



u 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



her "Recollections of Lord Byron," who after 
his expatriation from England in 1816, and dur- 
ing his residence in Italy, became, in Italian fesh- 
ion, her cavaliere serviente, or cicisbeo. This 
work, with its laudation of Lord Byron's charac- 
ter and poetry, and its allegations of cold-heart- 
edness and want of sympathy, and general unfit- 
ness to be a poet's wife, made against Lady By- 
ron (for nothing severer was said), was too much 
for the patience of Mrs. Stowe. Her secret was 
eating her heart away. She could keep silence 
no longer. As " no person in England," accord- 
ing to her belief, ' ' would, at that time, take the 
responsibility of relating the true history which 
was to clear Lady Byron's memory," she, an 
American, undertook it, without fear or scruple ; 
though she would not have done so but for the 
wicked Guiccioli. She declared, in the " Atlan- 
tic Monthly," and in "Macmillan's Magazine," 
in which two publications the story appeared si- 
multaneously, that all the materials of the story 
were left in her hands unreservedly by Lady By- 
ron, and that to her judgment alone was left the 
use that should he made of them. "Had this 
melancholy story (of Lord Byron) been allowed 
to sleep by Madame Guiccioli," no public use 
would have been made of this knowledge ; but 
the appearance of a popular attack on the char- 
acter of Lady Byron called for a vindication, 
and the true history of her married life was 
therefore related. 

Unless Lady Byron's intellect failed in her de- 
clining years, which no one has asserted, but 
which might not very uncharitably be supposed, 
it can scarcely be thought that, with the remark- 
able and, in fact, the cruel reticence which she 
displayed ^r forty years, she would have been 
goaded into the betrayal of so carefully kept a 
secret, and of such an odious chapter in her hus- 
band's life, if it were true, by such a hash of old 
materials as was given to the world by the vain 
and foolish though once lovely and fascinating 
Madame Guiccioli. Lady Byron, if she were 
only a tenth part as magnanimous as Mrs. Stowe 
describes her to have been, could have well af- 
forded to despise the attacks, the insinuations, 
and the second-hand criticism of the fair Italian. 
But Mrs. Stowe seems to have craved the noto- 
riety which Lady Byron all her life avoided ; 
justifying, in a remarkable manner, the truth of 
the old adage, that our friends continually do us 
more harm than our enemies. 

The completion of the story remains to be told. 
When Lady Byron discovered her husband's crim- 
inality with his half-sister, and was " driven" from 
his house, as alleged by herself and by Mrs. Stowe 
— fled from it of her own free will, and under a 
false pretence, as alleged by Lord Byron himself 
at the time and afterwards, till within a few 
weeks or days of his "death," — Lady Byron 
made but one condition with him. "*S^e had 
him in her power, and he stood at her mercy. 



She exacted only that the unhappy partner of 
his sins should not follow him out of England, 
and that the ruinous intrigue should be given 
up." 

Now, Mrs. Leigh, alleged to be the partner of 
Lord Byron's sins, was to the certain knowledge 
of Lady Byron at this time, and for years after- 
wards. Lady Byron's particular friend and inti- 
mate associate, as will appear from her own let- 
ters ; and was, moreover, living quietly, and to 
all appearance happily, with her husband. She 
had four children, all supposed by him to be his, 
and bom in lawful wedlock. One of these chil- 
dren, the youngest, Elizabeth Medora, was bora 
in 1815, the same year as Lady Byron's own 
daughter, Augusta Ada. This daughter, so dear- 
ly beloved by Lord as well as by Lady Byron, 
would not, most people would think, have been 
called by the name borne by Mrs. Leigh had 
Lady Bj^ron supposed her at that time to be, as 
Mrs. Stowe expresses it, " the unhappy partner 
of Lord Byron's guilt." More than this, Mrs. 
Leigh continued to live with her husband, who 
had no such suspicions of his wife as haunted the 
mind of Lady Byron — if such positive knowledge 
as Mrs. Stowe claims for her can be designated 
by such a weak word as " suspicion." For more 
than twenty years after the separation of Lord 
and Lady Byron, Colonel and the Hon. Augusta 
Leigh lived together as man and wife ; in the 
course of which time three more childi'en, or sev- 
en in all, were born to them. This, to say the 
least of it, is a remarkable circumstance as affect- 
ing the truth of Mrs. Stowe's narrative : nor is 
this the only incomprehensible portion of the 
tale ; or how could Lady Byron — unless she 
were either a consummate hypocidte or a very 
exceptionable piece of mortal clay, without whole- 
some human blood in her veins — write to such a 
woman as Mrs. Leigh must be considered, if the 
story were not the growth of a much later period 
of Lady Byron's life, with the affection, the cor- 
diality, and confidence which one virtuous woman 
feels for another as virtuous as herself, and whom 
she deems worthy to be treated as her friend? 
The letters, of which the genuineness is guaran- 
teed on the unimpeachable authority of Mr. Mur- 
ray and the ' ' Quarterly Review, " appeared in 
that publication in October, 1869. The first, 
undated, was, in the opinion of the "Quarterly 
Review," and as internal evidence would show, 
written in Lord Byron's house in Piccadilly 
shortly before Lady Byron left, and sent to Mrs. 
Leigh, who was also at the same time an inmate 
of the troubled household, who had come thither 
as a peacemaker, whose presence was equally ac- 
ceptable to both parties. Mrs. Leigh, it should 
be added — and the circumstance, if it were not 
for Lady Byron's letters, might be taken as part- 
ly corroborative of Mrs. Stowe's recital — remain- 
ed in the house for several weeks after Lady By- 
ron left, and until she knew that the rapture was 



INTRODUCTORY. 



15 



final, and that her intercession and good oflSces 
were no longer available. 



" You will think me very foolish, but I have 
tried two or three times, and cannot talk to you 
of your departure with a decent visage — so let 
me say one word in this way to spare my phi- 
losophy. With the expectations which I have, I 
never will nor can ask you to stay one moment 
longer than you are inclined to do. It would 
[be] the worst return for all I ever received from 
you. But, in this at least, I am ' truth itself 
when I say that, whatever the situation may be, 
there is no one whose society is dearer to me, or 
can contribute more to my happiness. These 
feelings will not change under any circumstances, 
and I should be grieved if you did not understand 
them. Should you hereafter condemn me I shall 
not love you less. I will say no more. Judge 
for yourself about going or staying. I wish you 
to consider yourself, if you could be wise enough 
to do that for the first time in your life. 

"Thine, A. LB. 
"Addressed on the cover 'To the Hon. Mrs. Leigh.' " 

II. 

"Kirkby Mallory, January 16, 1S16. 
(The day after she left London.) 
"Mt dearest a., — It is my great comfort 
that you are in Piccadilly." 

III. 

" Kirkby Mallory, January 23, 1816. 
" Dearest A., — I know you feel for me as I 
do for you, and perhaps I am better understood 
than I think. You have been, ever since I knew 
you, my best comforter, and will so remain, unless 
you grow tired of the office, which may well be. " 

IV. 

"January 25, 1816. 
"My dearest Augusta, — Shall I still be 
your sister? I must resign my rights to be so 
considered ; but I don't think that will make any 
difference in the kindness I have so unifonnly 
experienced from you. " 

V. 

" Kirkby Mallory, February 3, 1816. 
"Mt dearest Augusta, — You are desired 
by your brother to ask if my father has acted 
with my concurrence in pi'oposing a separation. 
He has. It cannot be supposed that, in my pres- 
ent distressing situation, I am capable of stating, 
in a detailed manner, the reasons which will not 
only justify this measure, but compel me to take 
it ; and it never can be my wish to remember 
unnecessarihi \_sic] those injuries for which, how- 
ever deep, I feel no resentment. I will now only 
recall to Lord Byron's mind his avowed and in- 
surmountable aversion to the mai'ried state, and 



the desire and determination he expressed ever 
since its commencement to free himself from that 
bondage, as finding it quite insupportable, though 
candidly acknowledging that no effort of duty or 
aff'ection has been wanting on my part. He has 
too painfully convinced me that all these attempts 
to contribute towards his happiness Avere wholly 
useless, and most unwelcome to him. I enclore 
this letter to my fixther, wishing it to receive his 
sanction. Ever yours most aff"ectionately, 

"A. LBykok." 

VI. 

"February 4,1816. 
"I hope, my dear A., that you would on no 
account withhold from your brother the letter 
which I sent yesterday, in answer to yours wi-it- 
ten by his desire ; particularly as one which I 
have received from himself to-day renders it still 
more important that he should know the contents 
of that addressed to you. I am, in haste and not 
very well, yours most affectionately, 

"A. I. Byron." 

VIL 

"Kirkby Mallory, February 14, 1816. 
"The present sufferings of all may yet be re- 
paid in blessings. Do not despair absolutely, 
dearest ; and leave me but enough of your in- 
terest to afford you any consolation, by partak- 
ing of that sorrow which I am most unhappy to 
cause thus unintentionally. You will be of my 
opinion hereafter, and at present your bitter- 
est reproach would be forgiven ; though Heaven 
knows you have considered me more than a thou- 
sand would have done — more than anything but 
my affection for B., one most dear to you, could 
deserv'e. I must not remember these feelings. 
Farewell ! God bless you from the bottom of 
my heart ! A. I. B. " 

These letters are conclusive of the fact that 
the scene recorded by Mrs. Stowe — with all its 
dramatic incidents — never occurred ; that at the 
time of the separation no suspicion of Mrs. Leigh 
had entered Lady Byron's mind, or that, if it 
had, she was one of the most incomprehensible 
hypocrites the world ever saw. And though no 
one will assert that Lady Byron did not in the 
3-ear 185G tell Mrs. Stowe the story of 1816 (we 
must do Mrs. Stowe the justice to say that she 
did not invent it), we cannot do otherwise than 
believe that at some later time — before or after 
Lord Byron's death, but certainly not for many 
years after the separation — Lady Byron, by hal- 
lucination in her own troubled and more or less 
disordered mind, either became convinced that 
Lord Byron had really committed incest and 
adulteiy, or that some exterior agency — out of 
and beyond herself — was brought to bear upon 
her ; and that she ultimately was brought to be- 
lieve in the later years of her life what she could 



16 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



not have believed, as an honest woman, as long 
as she treated Mrs. Leigh as her dear friend and 
companion, and one in every way worthy to as- 
sociate with and confide in. 

That there were such extraneous circumstan- 
ces is now known, and they will be fully detailed 
in the history of Ehzabeth Medora Leigh, whose 
name gives a title to this volume. In the mean 
while, and as further preparation for the proper 
comprehension of this sorrowful tale of an erring 
and most unfortunate young lady, it will make 
the narrative of Lady BjTon's charge against her 
husband more complete if we present a short 
summary of the fierce literary controversy that 
arose immediately after Mrs. Stowe's publication, 
both in England and America. The bitterness 
of feeling that was shown on behalf of Lord By- 
ron's memory, as well as on behalf of his lady's, 
showed that the lapse of forty-five years after 
Byron's death, and of fifty-three after his separa- 
tion from his wife, had neither impaired the ad- 
miration of his countrymen for his genius, nor 
diminished the love of personal scandal and slan- 
der, as between man and woman, which unhap- 
pily distinguishes the idle, the frivolous, and the 
shallow, in all ages and countries of the world. 
The majority ranged themselves on Lord By- 
ron's side, though a strong, vehement, and pas- 
sionate minority took the part of Lady Byron, 
believed implicitly in her truth, and dwelt with 
marked delight on the defects of Lord Byron's 
character ; defects that were but too glaring and 
too manifold, and too completely upon the sur- 
face, but that might and would have been allow- 
ed to rest in the oblivion into which they were 
fast falling, if it had not been for Mrs. Stowe's 
unauthorised publication. 

Into the consideration of the fiiults, the vices, 
or the crimes of Lord Byron, whatever they 
may have been, we decline to enter. More than 
enough has been said about them. All that we 
or the world have to do with the matter at this 
time is to judge of the truth or falsehood of the 
narrative with which Lady Bjtou inspired her 
American friend, and of the one great charge in- 
volved in it. To this one charge we confine our- 
selves. Three only of the letters among all the 
voluminous correspondence which the discussion 
of the subject brought down upon the columns of 
the daily, weekly, and monthly press, appear to 
us to require detailed notice ; the more especial- 
ly as they were aU written by the friends, rela- 
tives, or legal agents of Lady Byron herself, and 
not by any personal or literary friends of Lord 
Byron. 

The first, addressed to all the daily papers of 
London, bore the date of the 1 st of September, 
the date of the publication of Mrs. Store's arti- 
cle, and is signed by Messrs. Wharton and Fords, 
of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the solicitors of the de- 
scendants and representatives of Lady Byron. 
These gentlemen emphatically and authoritative- 



ly repudiated and condemned Mrs. Stowe's ac- 
tion in the matter, and denounced the publica- 
tion as not only incomplete and erroneous, but 
as a gross breach of trust. " Of the paper it- 
self," says Messrs. Wharton and Fords, "we 
should probably have abstained from taking anj' 
public notice if it had appeared in a less respecta- 
ble journal than 'Macmillan,' or if even in this 
periodical the authoress had been allowed to tell 
her story without editorial preface or comment. 
The editor of 'Macmillan,' however, has not 
only admitted Mrs. Stowe's article, but he has 
prefixed to it a note in which he authoritatively 
proclaims to the world that ' the paper on Lady 
Byron's life and relations to Lord Byron is the 
complete and authentic statement of the whole 
circumstances of that disastrous affair.' Nay, 
more — ' that this paper is, in fact. Lady Byron's 
own statement of the reasons which forced her to 
the separation which she so long resisted. " Again, 
the editor states that the contribution of Mrs. 
Stowe supplies ' evidence at once new and direct' 
on Lady Byron's history. 

"We, as the family solicitors, beg most dis- 
tinctly to state that the article is not ' a complete' 
or ' authentic statement' of the facts connected 
with the separation, that it cannot be regarded 
as Lady Byron's own statement, and that it does 
not involve any direct evidence on Lady Byron's 
histoiy. 

^ Hfi -^ ^ ^ 

' ' Without for a moment conceding that Mrs. 
Stowe's narrative contains a complete account 
of Lady Byron's relations with her husband, we 
must protest against it as being professedly, first, 
a most gross breach of the trust and confidence 
stated to have been reposed in her ; secondly, as 
inconsistent with her own recommendation to 
Lady Byron ; and thirdly, as an ignorant viola- 
tion (at least we shall in charity suppose Mrs. 
Stowe to be ignorant) of the express terms of 
Lady Byron's last will and testament. 

"First, as relates to a breach of trust. Mrs. 
Stowe states that she was consulted in an inter- 
view, which, to use her own words, ' had almost 
the solemnity of a deathbed, ' not as to whether 
she would undertake a redaction of Lady Byron's 
married history, but only as to the policy of pub- 
lishing such a history at all. Secondly, Mrs. 
Stowe, on her own admission, returned to Lady 
Bj'ron the brief memorandum-paper which had 
been entrusted to her, with the statement of her 
opinion that ' Lady Byron would be entirely jus- 
tifiable in leaving the truth to be disclosed after 
her death, and recommended that all facts nec- 
essary should be put in the hands of some per- 
sons to be so published. ' Thirdly, Lady Byron 
did by her last will and testament, executed a 
few days only before her decease, bequeath to 
three persons as trustees all her manuscripts, to 
be by them first sealed up, and afterwards depos- 
ited in a bank in the names of such trustees, 



INTRODUCTION. 



17 



and she directed that no one else, however nearly 
connected with her, should upon any plea what- 
ever be allowed to have access to or inspect such 
documents, which the trustees thereof were alone 
to make use of as they might judge to be best 
for the interests of her grandchildren. Mrs. 
Stowe is not one of these three. Her paper is 
entirely gratuitous, and unauthorised. It is, as 
we have said, not consistent with her o^^-n coun- 
sel ; it is an offence against Lady Byron's dying 
wishes ; and the authoress has written in utter 
disregard of the feelings of those grandchildren, 
of whom she speaks in a vague, fulsome way as 
'some of the best and noblest of mankind.' 
***** 

" ' Lady Byi'on's own statement is in the pos- 
session of those who love her memory too well 
to make a rash use of it ; and if the world is ever 
to leani the true story of Lady Byron's life it 

will learn it from them. ' " 

***** 

The second contribution towards the clearing 
up of the true history which Mrs. Stov/e had 
darkened, came from Lord Wentworth, son of 
Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, grandson of 
Lord and Lady Byron, and inheritor of the bar- 
ony of Wentworth, to which LadyByi'on herself 
would have succeeded had her life been spared. 
It was dated Boulogne, September the 7th, and 
addressed to the Pall Mall Gazette : — 

"Sir, — In your number of Sejrtember 3, 
you say that Mrs. Stowe is not a flagrant offend- 
er against pi'oprieties, because my sister and I 
are supposed to have intended to publish corre- 
spondence relating to Lord and Lady Byron's 
conjugal differences. 

"Now, supposing Mrs. Stowe's narrative to 
have been really a ' true story, ' and that we had 
meant to reveal the whole of our grandmother's 
history, I do not see what defence that is to Mrs. 
Stowe against the charge of repeating what was 
told her in a 'pi'ivate, confidential conversation.' 

' ' But it is not true that Lady Anne Blunt and 
I ever intended to publish correspondence of the 
nature mentioned. About three years ago a 
manuscript in Lady Noel Byron's handwriting 
was found among her papers, giving an account 
of some circumstances connected with her mar- 
riage, and apparently intended for publication 
after her death ; but as this seemed not quite 
certain, no decision as to its publication was 
come to. In the event of a memoir being wi'it- 
ten, this manuscript might, perhaps, be included, 
but hitherto it has not been proposed to publish 
any other matter about her separation. 

" This statement in Lady Byron^s own hand- 
writing does not contain any accusation of so 
grave a nature as that which Mrs. Stowe asserts 
was told her, and Mrs. Stowe's story of the sepa- 
ration is inconsistent with what Ihave seen in va- 
rious letters, §-c., of Lady Byron's. 
B 



' ' Lady Byron says in her own statement that 
before being pubUshed it ought to be submitted 
to some person who had read through the con- 
sumed Byron memoirs, so as to secure the cor- 
rection of any misstatements. I cannot see that 
Messrs. Wharton and Fords make no charge of 
material inaccuracy against Mrs. Stowe ; I be- 
lie\e they meant to assert the inaccuracy of the 
whole ai'ticle. I, for one, cannot allow that Mrs. 
Stoice's statement is substantially correct (accord- 
ing to your inference, and tliat of one or two oth- 
er newspapers). 

" I remain your obedient senant, 

"Wentworth." 

A second letter from Lady Byron's grandson 
appeared nine days afterwards, addressed to the 
editor of the Daily News, in rejjly to some com- 
ments which had been made by that journal, but 
need not be republished here, as it adds nothing 
to his Lordship's previous and very decisive com- 
munication. 

The third and last of this series of communi- 
cations to the press, to which it is necessary for 
the purjjose of these pages to refer, were two let- 
ters addressed to the editor of the Times by Lord 
Lindsay, one on the 3d and the other on the 14th 
of September. The first was particularly remark- 
able, as stating the experience of Lady Anne 
Barnard, an old and intimate friend of Lady By- 
ron, a literary lady, and a poetess of no mean 
mark, who, for the sake of literature, might pos- 
sibly have sympathised with Lord Byron — if it 
were possible to do so — but who, on the contrary, 
thought very badly of Lord Byron, and spoke 
her mind unreservedly of his strange behaviour 
to his wife, but never di'eamed of or imagined 
as possible such a charge as that made by Mrs. 
Stowe, and which, if Lady Byron had herself 
made it at the time alleged by her to Mrs. Stowe, 
could not have failed to come to Lady Anne's 
knowledge. The letter was as follows : — 

" Sir, — I have waited in expectation of a cat- 
egorical denial of the horrible charge brought by 
Mrs. Beecher Stowe against Lord Byron and his 
sister, on the alleged authority of the late Lady 
Byron. Such denial has been only indirectly 
given by the letter of Messrs. Wharton and 
Fords, in your impression of yesterday. That 
letter is sufficient to prove that Lady Byron nev- 
er contemplnted the use made of her name, and 
that her descendants and representatives disclaim 
any countenance of IMrs. B. Stowe's article ; but 
it does not specifically meet Mrs. Stowe's allega- 
tion that Lady Byron, in conversing with her 
thirteen years ago, affirmed the charge now be- 
fore us. It remains open, thei"efoi-e, to a scan- 
dal-loving world to credit the calumny through 
the advantage of this flaw, involuntarily, I be- 
lieve, in the answer produced against it. My 
object in addressing you is to supply that defi- 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



clency by proving that what is now stated on 
Lady Byron's supposed authority is at variance 
in all respects with what she stated immediately 
after the separation, when everything was fresh 
in her memoiy in relation to the time during 
which, according to Mrs. B. Stowe, she believed 
that Byron and his sister were living together in 
guilt. I publish this evidence with reluctance, 
but in obedience to that higlier obligation of 
justice to the Yoiceless and defenceless dead 
which bids me break through a reserve that 
otherwise I should have held sacred. The Lady 
BjTon of 1818 would, I am certain, have sanc- 
tioned my doing so had she foreseen the present 
unparalleled occasion, and the bar that the condi- 
tions of her will present (as I infer from Messrs. 
Wharton and Fords' letter) against any fuller 
communication. Calumnies such as the present 
sink deep and with rapidity into the public mind, 
and are not easily eradicated. The fame of one 
of our greatest poets, and that of the kindest, and 
truest, and most constant friend that Byron ever 
had, is at stake ; and it will not do to wait for 
revelations from the fountain-head which are not 
promised, and possibly may never reach us. 

"The late Lady Anne Barnard, who died 
in 1825, a contemporaiy and friend of Burke, 
Windham, Dundas, and a host of the wise and 
good of that genei'ation, and remembered in let- 
ters as the authoress of ' Auld Robin Gray, ' had 
known the late Lady Byron from infancy, and 
took a warm interest in her, holding Lord Byron 
in corresponding repugnance, not to say preju- 
dice, in consequence of what she believed to be 
his harsh and cruel treatment of her young friend. 
I transcribe the following passages, and a letter 
from Lady Byron herself (written in 1818) from 
ricordl, or private family memoirs, in Lady Anne's 
autograph now before me. I include the letter 
because, although treating only in general terms 
of the matter and causes of the separation, it af- 
fords collateral evidence bearing strictly upon 
the point of the credibility of the charge now in 
question : — 

" ' The separation of Lord and Lady Byron 
astonished the world, which believed him a re- 
formed man as to his habits, and a becalmed 
man as to his remorses. He had written noth- 
ing that appeared after his marriage till the fo- 
mous "Fai-e Thee Well," which had the power 
of compelling those to pity the writer who were 
not well aware that he was not the unhappy per- 
son he affected to be. Lady Bj'^ron's misery was 
whispered soon after her marriage, and his ill- 
usage ; but no word transpired, no sign escaped 
from her. She gave birth shortly to a daughter ; 
and when she went as soon as she was recovered 
on a visit to her father's, taking her little Ada 
with her, no one knew that it was to return to 
her lord no more. At that period a severe fit of 
illness had confined me to bed for two months. 



I heard of Lady Byron's distress ; of the pains 
he took to give a harsh impression of her char- 
acter to the world. I wrote to her, and entreat- 
ed her to come and let me see and hear her, if 
she conceived my sympathy or counsel could be 
any comfort to her. She came — but what a tale 
was unfolded by this interesting young creature, 
who had so fondly hoped to have made a young 
man of genius and romance (as she supposed) 
happy ! They had not been an hour in the car- 
riage which conveyed them from the church 
when, breaking into a malignant sneer: "Oh! 
what a dupe you have been to your imagination. 
How is it possible a woman of your sense could 
form the wild hope of reforming vie ? Many are 
the tears you will have to shed ere that plan is 
accomplished. It is enough for me that you are 
my wife for me to hate you ; if you were the 
wife of any other man I own you might have 
charms," etc. I, who listened, was astonished. 
"How could you go on after this," said I, "my 
dear? Why did you not return to j'our fii- 
ther's?" "Because I had not a conception he 
was in earnest ; because I reckoned it a bad jest, 
and told him so, — that my opinions of him were 
very diff'erent from his of himself, otherwise he 
would not find me by his side. He laughed it 
over when he saw me appear hurt, and I forgot 
what had passed till forced to remember it. I 
believe he was pleased with me, too, for a little 
while. I suppose it had escaped his memory 
that I was his wife." But she described the 
happiness they enjoyed to have been unequal and 
perturbed. Her situation in a short time might 
have entitled her to some tenderness, but she 
made no claim on him for any. He sometimes 
reproached her for the motives that had induced 
her. to marry him — all was ' ' vanity, the vanity 
of Miss Milbanke can-ying the point of reforming 
Lord Byron ! He always knew her inducements ; 
her pride shut her eyes to Ms; he wished to 
build up his character and his fortunes ; both 
were somewhat deranged ; she had a high name, 
and would have a fortune worth his attention, — 
let her look to that for his motives!" "O By- 
ron, Byron," she said, "how you desolate me !" 
He would then accuse himself of being mad, and 
throw himself on the ground in a frenzy, which 
she believed was affected to conceal the coldness 
and maligrtity of his heart — an affectation which 
at that time never failed to meet with the ten- 
derest commiseration. I could find by some im- 
plications, not followed up by me, lest she might 
haA'e condemned herself afterwards for her in- 
voluntary disclosures, that he soon attempted to 
corrupt her principles, both with respect to her 
own conduct and her latitude for his. She saw 
the precipice on which she stood, and*kept his 
fister with her as much as possible. He return- 
ed in the evenings from the haunts of vice, where 
he made her understand he had been, with man- 
ners so profligate! "Oh, the wretch!" said I; 



rNTRODUCTORY. 



19 



"and had he no moments of remorse ?" " Some- 
times he appeared to have them. One night, 
coming home from one of his lawless parties, he 
saw me so indignantly collected, and bearing all 
with such a determined calmness, that a rush of 
remorse seemed to come over him ; he called 
himself a monster, though his sister was present, 
and threw himself in agony at my feet. I could 
not — no — I could not forgive him such injuries. 
He had lost me for ever!" Astonished at the 
return of virtue, my tears, I believe, flowed over 
his face, and I said, "Byron, all is forgotten ; 
never, never shall you hear of it more!" He 
started up, and, folding his arms while he looked 
at me, burst into laughter. ' ' What do you 
mean?" said I. "Only a philosophical experi- 
ment, that's all," said he. "I wished to ascer- 
tain the value of your resolutions." I need not 
say more of this prince of duplicity, except that 
varied were his methods of rendering her wretch- 
ed, even to the last. When her lovely little child 
was born, and it was laid beside its mother on 
the bed, and he was informed " he might see 
his daughter," after gazing at it with an ex- 
ulting smile, this was the ejaculation that broke 
from him — "O ! what an implement of torture 
have I acquired in you !" Such he rendered 
it by his eyes and manner, keeping her in a 
joerpetual alann for its safety when in his pres- 
ence. All this reads madder than I believe he 
was ; but she had not then made up her mind to 
disbelieve his pretended insanity, and conceived 
it best to intrust her secret with the excellent Dr. 
BaiUie, telling him all that seemed to regard the 
state of her husband's mind, and letting his ad- 
vice regulate her conduct. Baillie doubted of 
his derangement, but, as he did not reckon his 
own opinion infallible, he wished her to take pre- 
cautions as if her husband was so. He recom- 
mended her going to the countiy, but to give him 
no suspicions of her intentions of remaining there, 
and for a short time to show no coldness in her 
letters till she could better ascertain his state. 
She went — regretting, as she told me, to wear 
any semblance but the truth. A short time dis- 
closed the story to the world. He acted the part 
of a man driven to despair by her inflexible re- 
sentment, and by the arts of a governess (once a 
servant in the family), who hated him. ' ' I will 
give you," proceeds Lady Anne, "a few para- 
graphs transcribed from one of. Lady Byron's 
own letters to me. It is sorrowful to think that 
in a very little time this young and amiable crea- 
ture, wise, patient, and feeling, will have her char- 
acter mistaken by every one who reads Byron's 
works. To rescue her from this I preserved her 
letters, and when she afterwards expressed a fear 
that anything of her writing should ever fall into 
hands to injure him (I suppose she meant by pub- 
lication), I safely assured her that it never should. 
But here this letter shall be placed, a sacred rec- 
ord in her favour unknown to hei-self : — 



" ' " I am a very incompetent judge of the im- 
pression which the last canto of "Cliilde Har- 
old" may produce on the minds of indiff"erent 
readers. It contains the usual trace of a con- 
science restlessly awake, though his object has 
been too long to aggravate its burden, as if it 
could thus be oppressed into eternal stupor. I 
will hope, as you do, that it survives for his ulti- 
mate good. It was the acuteness of his remorse, 
impenitent in its character, which so long seemed 
to demand from my compassion to spare every 
semblance of reproach, every look of grief, whicli 
might have said to his conscience, "You have 
made me wretched. " I am decidedly of opinion 
that he is responsible. He has wished to be 
thought partially deranged, or on the brink of 
it, to perplex observers, and prevent them from 
tracing efl^ects to their real causes through all 
the intricacies of his conduct. I was, as I told 
you, at one time the dupe of his acted insanity, 
and clung to the former delusions in regard to 
the motives that concerned me personally till the 
whole system was laid bare. He is the absolute 
monarch of words, and uses them, as Bonaparte 
did lives, for conquest, without more regard to 
their intrinsic value, considering them onl}' as 
ciphers, which must derive all their import from 
the situation in which he places them and the 
ends to which he adapts them with such con- 
summate skill. Why, then, you will say, does he 
not emi)loy them to give a better colour to his 
own character ? Because he is too good an act- 
or to over-act, or to assume a moral garb whicli 
it would be easy to strip oft". In regard to his 
poetry, egotism is the vital principle of his imag- 
ination, which it is difiicult for him to kindle on 
any subject with twhich his ovm character and 
interests are not identified : but by the introduc- 
tion of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or 
time, he has enveloped his poetical disclosures in 
a system impenetrable except to a very few, and 
his constant desire of creating a sensation makes 
him not averse to be the object of wonder and 
cm'iosity, even though accompanied by some dark 
and vague suspicions. Nothing has contributed 
more to the misunderstanding of his real charac- 
ter than the lonely grandeur in which he shrouds 
it, and his affectation of being above mankind, 
when he exists almost in their voice. The ro- 
mance of his sentiments is another feature of 
this mask of state. I know no one more habitu- 
ally destitute of that enthusiasm he so beautifully 
expresses, and to which he can work up his fancy 
chiefly by contagion. I had heard he was the 
best of brothers, the most generous of friends ; 
and I thought such feelings only required to be 
warmed and cherished into more diffusive benev- 
olence. Though these opinions are eradicated, 
and could never return but with the decay of my 
memory, you will not wonder if there are still 
moments when the association of feelings which 
arose from tliem soften and sadden my thoughts. 



20 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



Bat I have not thanked you, dearest Lady Anne, 
for your kindness in regard to a principal object 
— that of rectifying false impressions. I trust 
yon understand my wishes, which never were to 
injure Lord Byron in any way ; for, though he 
would not suffer me to remain his wife, he can- 
not prevent me from continuing his friend ; and 
it was from considering myself as such that I si- 
lenced the accusations by which my own conduct 
might have been more fully justified. It is not 
necessary to speak ill of his heart in general ; it 
is sufficient that to me it was hard and impene- 
trable — that my own must have been broken be- 
fore his could have been touched. I would rath- 
er represent this as my misfortune than as Ids 
guilt ; but, surely, that misfortune is not to be 
made my crime ! Such are my feelings : you 
will judge how to act. His allusions to me in 
"Childe Harold" are cruel and cold, but Anth 
such a semblance as to make me appear so, and 
to attract all sympathy to himself. It is said in 
this poem that hatred of him will be taught as a 
lesson to his child. I might appeal to all who 
have ever heard me speak of him, and still more 
to my own heart, to witness that there has been 
no moment when I have remembered injury oth- 
eiTvise than affectionately and sorrowfully. It is 
not my duty to give way to hopeless and wholly 
unrequited aifection ; but so long as I live, my 
chief struggle will probably be not to remember 
him too kindly. I do not seek the sympathy of 
the world, but I wish to be known by those 
whose opinion is valuable and whose kindness is 
dear to me. Among such, my dear Lady Anne, 
you will ever be remembered by your truly affec- 
tionate A. Byron." ' " 

"It is the province of your readers," continues 
Lord Lindsay, "and of the world at large, to 
judge between the two testimonies now before 
them — Lady Byron's in 1816 and 1818, and that 
put forward in 18G9 by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, as 
communicated by Lady Bjron thirteen years ago. 
In the face of the evidence now given, positive, 
negative, and circumstantial, there can be but 
two alternatives in the case, — either IMrs. Beech- 
er Stowe must have entirely misunderstood Lady 
Byron, and been thus led into error and mis- 
statement, or we must conclude that, under the 
pressure of a lifelong and secret sorrow. Lady 
Byron's mind had become clouded with an hal- 
lucination in respect of the particular point in 
question. 

"The reader will admire the noble but severe 
character displayed in Lady Byron's letter ; but 
those Avho keep in view what her first impressions 
were, as above recorded, may probably place a 
more lenient interpretation than hers upon some 
of the incidents alleged to Byron's discredit. I 
shall conclude with some remarks upon his char- 
acter, written shortly after his death by a wise, 
virtuous, and charitable judge, the late Sir Walter 



Scott, likewise in a letter to Lady Anne Bar- 
nard : — 

" 'Fletcher's account of poor Byron is extreme- 
ly interesting. I had always a strong attachment 
to that unfortunate though most richly gifted 
man, because I thought I saw that his virtues 
(and he had many) were his own, and his eccen- 
tricities the i-esult of an irritable temperament, 
which sometimes approached nearly to mental 
disease. Those who are gifted with strong 
nerves, a regular temper, and habitual self-com- 
mand, are not perhaps aware how much of what 
they may think virtue they owe to constitution ; 
and such are but too severe judges of men like 
Byron, whose mind, like a day of alternate storm 
and sunshine, is all dark shades and stray gleams 
of light, instead of the twilight grey which illu- 
minates happier though less distinguished mor- 
tals. I always thought that when a moral prop- 
osition was placed plainly before Lord Byron, his 
mind yielded a pleased and willing assent to it ; 
but if there was any side-view given, in the way 
of raillery or otherwise, he was willing enough to 
evade conviction. ... It augurs ill for the 
cause of Greece that this master-spirit should 
have been withdrawn from their assistance just 
as he was obtaining a complete ascendency over 
their counsels. I have seen several letters from 
the Ionian Islands, all of which unite in speaking 
in the highest praise of the wisdom and temper- 
ance of his counsels, and the ascendency he was 
obtaining over the turbulent and ferocious chiefs 
of the insurgents. I have some verses written by 
him on his last birthday ; they breathe a spirit of 
affection toward his wife, and a desire of djdng 
in battle, which seems like an anticipation of his 
approaching fiite. ' 

" I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, 

"Lindsay. 
"Dnnecht, September 3." 

Lord Lindsay's second letter to the limes add- 
ed nothing to the facts in the first, but drew a se- 
ries of incontrovertible deductions from the state- 
ments therein contained, as compared with the 
statements of Mrs. Stowe, all of them tending to 
confirm the view we have already taken in the 
preceding pages, and which all impartial and 
competent persons, who have devoted adequate 
attention to the subject, have taken — namely, 
that whatever were the charges brought secretly 
or overtly against Lord Byron, prior to and at 
the time of the separation, the charge of incest 
was not sei'iously entertained, if heard of, by any- 
body. He was accused, if not by his wife, by the 
idle scandalmongers who drew their own conclu- 
sions from her inexplicable silence, of "brutal- 
ity," " drunkenness, " ' ' madness, " ' ' bigamy, " 
"murder," and, as Lord Byron himself mock- 
ingly said, "of eveiy crime that could be, and of 
many that could not be committed. " But though 



INTKODUCTOEY. 



it is evident from all contemporary evidence, and 
from Lady Byron's own lettei's to Mrs. Leigh, 
that the charge of incest was not made in 1816 
— and from Lady Byron's letter to her friend 
Lady Anne Barnard, in 1818, that it was not 
made two years afterwards— it is equally evident 
that the stoiy as told by Mrs. Stowe is untrue as 



21 

regards its date, and that the charge was first 
made at a much later time. When was that 
time ? Who made it ? And did Lady Byron 
believe it, and lend it countenance ? These in- 
quiries will all find their answer in the history 
and autobiography of Elizabeth Medora Leigh, 
wliich will be duly set forth in the next chapter. 



PART 11. 



MEDORA LEIGH ; A HISTORY AIST) AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



Serenely purest of her sex that live, 
But wanting one sweet weakness — to forgive ; 
Too shock'd at faults her soul can never know, 
She deems that all could be like her below : 
Foe to all vice, yet hardly Virtue's friend, 
For Virtue pardons those she would amend. 

Lord Byron. "J. Sketch." 



PAET 11. 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



In the summer of 1843, twenty-seven j'ears 
aftei" the separation of Lord and Lady Byron, 
and nineteen years after the death of Lord By- 
ron at Missolonghi, there arrived in London from 
Paris and the South of France, where she had 
resided for some time previously, a young lady, 
with a pretty little daughter, nine or ten years 
old. The lady represented herself as the fourth 
child of the Hon. Augusta Leigh, the sister of 
Lord Byron. She was born, she said, in 1815, 
and was consequently in her twenty-eighth year. 
She was good-looking rather than eminently 
handsome, had dark eyes and hair, and a dark 
complexion, and was altogether a very lively and 
agreeable person. She was not, however, in 
strong health ; and, worst of all to her at the mo- 
ment, she was without the means of subsistence 
for herself and daughter, the little girl Marie, to 
whom she was passionately attached, and whom 
she had bi'ought with her from Hyeres. She had 
come to England to urge a claim which she had, 
or fancied she had, upon the generosity and kind 
feeling of Lady Byron ; and her expenses from 
Paris to London had been defi-ayed by Captain 

De B , a gallant veteran of the British army, 

who had seiwed through the Peninsular war in 
the 71st Regiment, and had received several se- 
vere wounds at the battle of Waterloo, for which 
he enjoyed a pension of £100 per annum. This 
officer, who had long been resident in the South 
of France, had found INIiss Leigh in Paris in a 
state of utter destitution, had heard her sad story, 
had relieved her to the extent his limited means 
allowed, and had defrayed the charges of her re- 
turn to England, in order that she might plead 
her cause in person with her wealthy and power- 
ful relatives, and especially with Lady Byron, 
who had long treated her with motherly affection, 
and paid for her maintenance, but who had sud- 
denly withdra^vn her fiivour, and left her and her 
child to perish of neglect and hunger. Captain 

De B (the officer just mentioned), in the 

course of a business visit to his London corre- 
spondents, incidentally mentioned, as a reason for 
requiring some more money than usual, the cir- 
cumstances of his extra expenditure for Miss 
Leigh, whose parentage he stated, alleging her to 
be the daughter of Lord Byron and Mrs. Leigh. 
This strange statement, if only as an apparent 
solution of the hitherto undivulged cause of the 
separation of Lord and Lady Byron, naturally ex- 
cited great curiosity and mterest in those who 



heard it, particularly in one of the partners, who 
had spent some days in Lord Byi'on's company 
in one of the Greek islands ; and he determined 
to inquire into the truth of it. Miss Leigh proved 
to his entire satisfaction, by documentaiy evi- 
dence in her possession, that she was indeed the 
daughter of the Hon. Augusta Leigh ; detailed to 
him, and afterwards gave him in writing, the 
whole history of her unhappy life ; and so deeply 
impressed him in her favour, that he took meas- 
ures, without divulging their object, to obtain 
confidential access to some of the high persona- 
ges interested in her case — in order, if possible, 
that she might be reinstated in the high position 
which she had fonnerly held in Lady Byron's af- 
fections, and which she had strangely forfeited, 
without, as she knew, any fault of her own. She 
alleged (as it satisfactorily appears from other and 
corroboratory evidence, with perfect tnith) that 
her mother, Mrs. Leigh, and her aunt. Lady By- 
ron, had given her what is called in legal parlance 
a " Deed of Appointment," by which the sum of 
£3000 was to become payable to her after the 
death of these ladies. She was in such dire dis- 
tress, on the very brink of starvation, dependent 
wholly upon the pitying charity of an unwealthy 
officer, on wliom she had no claim beyond that 
of common humanity, that she desired to sell her 
reversionaiy interest for whatever sum, however 
moderate, it might realise in the market. She 
also claimed a box of valuable family papers and 
letters which she had entrusted to Lady Byron's 
custody, but which was said to have been stolen 
from Lady Byi'on's house in Moore Place, by a 
French waiting-woman and her husband, a valet 
or courier, who had been employed bj^ Lady By- 
ron, in the days when she and Miss Leigh were 
friends, to act as her sei-vants in the South of 
France. This man being, as was believed, in 
possession of the box and documents, attempted 
to extort money from Lady Byron, and from the 
Earl and Countess of Lovelace, by threats of pub- 
lishing the particulars of Miss Leigh's birth and 
parentage, which he thought would be painful to 
all the noble families interested in and related to 
the Hon. Mrs. Leigh and her husband. The 
most active of the two partners in the firm to 
whom Miss Leigh was introduced by their client 
— the most active, at least, as far as this poor la- 
dy's case was concerned — was a gentleman whom, 
for the purposes of this narrative, we shall desig- 
nate by the initial letter of his name as Mr. S . 



2G 



MEDORA LEIGH : 



The documents and papers on which this narra- 
tive is founded came from his hands, and are 
published by his consent and authority. The 
originals are in the possession of the publisher* of 
tliis volume, and will be shown to any one who 
has any legal pretence to inspect them. 

Before proceeding further with Miss Leigh's 
previous history and career, or with a narrative 
of the efforts that were made in 18-13, by herself 
and her friends, to procure for her a return of 
the maternal Idndness of Lady Byron, a few 
words in relation to the pedigree and genealogy 
of the Byron family will not only be in place, but 
wiU materially conduce to the clear comprehen- 
sion of Miss Leigh's history, and of the claims she 
preferred upon certain noble persons with whom 
she was connected through her mother. 

The grandfather of Lord Byron was Admiral 
Byron, celebrated by his grandson, with a par- 
donable pride, as a great navigator, or circumnav- 
igator of the globe, at a time when such circum- 
navigation was so rare as to be remarkable. In 
the year 1748, the Admiral married a Miss Tre- 
vanion, of Carhays, in Cornwall. His son. Cap- 
tain Byi-on, born in 1756, and the father of the 
poet, was twice maiTied — first to Lady Amelia 
D'Arcy, only daughter and heiress of Robert, last 
Earl of Holdernesse. The earldom did not de- 
scend to heirs female, but the barony of Conyers 
did ; and Baroness Conyers married for the first 
time Francis Marquis of Carmarthen, and after- 
wards the fifth Duke of Leeds. She had two 
children by this nobleman, one of whom succeed- 
ed to his fiither's dukedom and his mother's bar- 
ony. She was divorced from and by her hus- 
band in May 1779. Captain Byron, the predis- 
posing cause of the divorce, immediately after- 
wards married Lady Conyers, who dropped, as a 
matter of course, the title of Marchioness of Car- 
marthen. By her, who died in 1781, he had two 
daughters — one who died an infant, and the oth- 
er, Augusta, who mamed her cousin, Colonel 
Leigh, of the 10th Dragoon Guards. Pour years 
after the death of Lady Conyers, Captain Byron 
married Miss Gordon, of Gight, a Scottish lady, 
by whom he had a son, the afterwards famous 
poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron. The Hon. 
Augusta Byron, aftenvards by marriage the Hon. 
Augusta Leigh, was thus the half-sister of Lord 
Byron — his father's but not his mother's child. 
It follows, from this genealogical statement, that 
there was a connection between the noble fami- 
lies of Leeds, Conyers, and Byron, which will ac- 
count for some of the names introduced into the 
autobiography of Miss Leigh. 

Mr. S (and the reader, for reasons satis- 
factory to that gentleman and to the Editor, must 
be pleased to accept the initial under which he 
chooses to screen himself from a publicity which 
at his age would be unwelcome) was no sooner 



* Kichard Bentley, London. 



persuaded that the case of Medora Leigh was 
genuine, than he sought an introduction to and 
an inten'iew -vvith Dr. Lushington, who was then, 
as he had been since 181G, in Lady Byron's full- 
est confidence. The object of the interview was 
not communicated in the letter of introduction ; 

and Mr. S had to state it, together with his 

gi-ounds of intercession, in direct terms to the 
eminent civiUan, who on his part received the 
statement as an understood fact. The first in- 
terview led to no other result than the following 
note: — 

"Dr. Lushington presents his compliments to 

Mr. S , and is sorry to say that he has no 

communication to make from Lady Noel BjTon. 
Dr. Lushington has written twice to Lady Byron 

since he saw Mr. S , but, unfortunately, his 

first letter has not reached her, in consequence of 
her moving from place to place. 

" Great George Street, July — " 
(day of the month omittecl). 

Between the day when this note was written 
and the 21st of the same month. Dr. Lushington 
received two letters from Lady BjTon in reply to 
those which he had addressed to her. He there- 
upon requested a second interview with Mr. 

S , in order to read those letters to him. Mr. 

S attended to the summons, and, as in the 

first instance, noted down the whole conversation 
within half an hour after its occurrence, and 
while every Avord, phrase, point, and question were 
still fresh in his memory. 

" memorandum of conversation with de. 

lushington, this 21st of july, 1843, at 

4 o'clock. 

"Dr. Lushington read a letter from Lady 
Noel Byi-on, stating ' that she had received his 
letters, but was not to be moved, by the argu- 
ments used in behalf of Miss Leigh, from her 
determination to have no further intercourse with 
her. That Mr. S was veiy imperfectly in- 
formed as to Miss Leigh's conduct towards her, 
and she (Lady Byron) did not mean to make it 
more known. She deeply commiserated Miss 
Leigh, but she could not consent to renew com- 
munication with her. ' 

"I said that that letter seemed to shut the 
door upon all hope of reconciliation, whatever 
Miss Leigh might do in the way of submission ; 
and that as to my being imperfectly informed of 
her conduct, I might be so, but it must be some- 
thing done between Lady BjTon's last letter to 
her in Paris and Dr. King's ofier of £300 a year, 
and the present time. That down to Miss Leigh's 
leaving Hyeres, nothing could be more affection- 
ate, more motherly and considerate, than Lady 
Byron's letters. The going to Paris had given 
offence, but it was justified ; and though the 
justification was not admitted, intercourse was 



A HISTORY AND AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



27 



reopened by letter, and by messages and offers 
through Dr. King. What had been done since, 
except the receiving of Mrs. Leigh's Deed of Ap- 
pointment and the letter of Miss Leigh to Lord 
Chichester, I did not know ; but I had heard of 
nothing, and I did not think there was any thing 
nnpardonably ottensive in these. 

" Dr. Lushington said he knew no more than 
I did, and had not heard of the affair at all, till 
within tlie last six weeks or two months ; that 
Lady Byron was not likely to be moved by any 
further representations on his part, as he had 
written two long letters to her, filling two sheets 
of paper, with a full recapitulation of everything 
I had urged at our former conversation, and the 
answer (which showed that he had so done) was 
what he had read. 

" I said that the case became one of simple 
stan-ation for Miss Leigh and her child; that 
Captain De B was not only not able to con- 
tinue to pay for her living, but he must return to 
France immediately, and the girl would be utter- 
ly destitute. 1 urged eveiything that I could 
think of to induce Di". Lushington to view the 
matter as of infinite importance to Lady Byron's 
and to Lady Lovelace's peace of mind ; that no 
idea of threat, or terror, or extortion had ever 
entered the heads of Miss Leigh's present ad- 
visers ; tliat propriety was to be considered, pub- 
licity to be guarded against in every way, — but 
what was the girl to do for bread ? 

" Dr. Lushington gave no answer to any of 
my remarks in the way of appeal to Lady By- 
ron's feelings, or to the consequences of driving 
Miss Leigh to desperation, or to some communi- 
cation with persons who, without doing her ulti- 
mate good, might do infinite harm to eveiy mem- 
ber of the Byron family ; but he said that if I 
would take his advice, I shoidd go to Sir George 
Stephen, and should recommend Miss Leigh to 
see him and to conduct herself well to him. 
That there was a chance that he might effect 
something favourable for her, but he had no au- 
thority for saying this, and guarded me against be- 
ing led to hope anything from it. 

"I said that I could not conceive, that after 
the failure of his attempts to conciliate Lady By- 
ron, there could be any hope of Sir George Ste- 
phen's succeeding, and I repudiated the thought 
of trying him. 

" Dr. Lushington : 'There may be others of 
the fiimily to whom he has access, — I cannot 
say more ; I believe that is the only chance at 
all for Miss Leigh. I am not at liberty to say 
more — you understand me ?' 

' ' I said I should consult Miss Leigh and act ac- 
cording to her instructions, but upon the strength 
of what he said, I shoidd recommend the adop- 
tion of his advice, although I doubted Miss Leigh's 
concurrence ; and at all events, if I succeeded in 
procuring means of subsistence from any other 
source than Lady Byron, it was clear that there 



was an end of all obligation and all circumspec- 
tion as regarded her or her daughter. I men- 
tioned that the French valet was in London, 
and had said that he should seek sa\ opportunity 
of insulting or assaulting Lord Lovelace, that he 
might be taken to Bow Street for tlie purpose of 
publishing Miss Leigh's histoiy through the po- 
lice reports. 

"Dr. Lushington said that the valet had 
bi-ought an action against Lady Byron, and on 
my asking what for, he answered that he sup- 
posed it was of a general nature for money, and 
that he most assmedly should advise Lady By- 
ron to defend it and to keep him at arm's length. 

' ' I pointed out to Dr. Lushington, as I had 
formerly done, that it was this man and his wife 
who had caused all the mischief, and that it was 
unfair not to consider Miss Leigh's youth and ig- 
norance of the world. 

" Dr. Lushington evaded all answer to these 
allusions, but repeated his advice as to Sir 
George Stephen. I said that I saw no resource 
but a sale of the Deed of Appointment for pres- 
ent pui-poses ; and future events might be as 
they may ; and that I was most deeply grieved 
and disappointed at the upshot of my endeav- 
ours. I said that the wife of the valet had made 
application to Lady Byron, in behalf of Miss 
Leigh, for a box of important documents and pa- 
pers belonging to her, of which Lady Byron had 
the custody ; but she (Lady Byron) refused to 
give it up except to Miss Leigh herself; that 
the valet's wife had given back the key to ]\Iiss 
Leigh. 

" Dr. Lushington said that the box had dis- 
appeared from INIoore House from the moment 
tliat the valet's wife had been in it ; that they 
had searched over and over again for it. Lady 
ByTon wanted to advertise the loss, but he stop- 
ped it as useless and unadvisable. 

" We parted on the understanding of my com- 
municating to Miss Leigh, and acting as should 
be concerted ; but all hope of further communi- 
cation with Lady Byron, either at an interview or 
by writing, was given up. 

"The above is written within half an hour 
after the conversation took i^lace. T. S." 

Acting, though somewhat reluctantly, upon the 
advice given by Dr. Lushington in this interview, 

Mr. S had several intei-views and conferences 

with Sii" George Stephen, who at that time was 
an eminent attorney in the city of London. He 
acted as the legal adviser of Lady Byron, and 
was furthermore known in the world of letters as 
the author of an amusing volume, ' ' The Adven- 
tures of a Gentleman in search of a Horse, by 
Caveat Emptor." Sir George, after ample time 
for deliberation, set forth his views on the whole 
subject of Miss Leigh's distresses, her claims upon 
the kindheartedness of Lady Byron, and the 
methods by which,- and by which only, she coiUd, 



2S 



MEDORA LEIGH ; 



in his opinion, be restored to the favour she had 
lor felted, in the following letter : — 

" IT, King's Arms Yard, Coleman Street, 
"August 9, 1843. 

" Sir, — I have not succeeded in obtaining the 
letters of Miss Leigh. If I had, I should have 
written to you before. 

" I retain the same disposition to assist her, by 
mediation with her friends, and shall feel tnily 
rejoiced to be the means of extricating her from 
her present false and painful position ; but I can- 
not undertake the office on any other terms than 
those that I proposed to you in the interview with 
which you favoured me, namely : 

"Her suiTender of the Deed of Appointment, 
as a sacred provision, to trastees — for her child. 

" Her written expression of her sincere contri- 
tion for her conduct to Lady Byron. 

' ' Her return to seclusion in France. 

" On these terms I will exert myself to the ut- 
most, to obtain for her from her friends a perma- 
nent and comfortable domicile in France, and I 
am convinced that I shall succeed. But on any 
other tenns I cannot feel it right again to inter- 
pose. Heaven forbid that I should stipulate for 
any self-degrading conditions ! I am so far from 
meaning it, that if there is any modification of 
my terms that you or she can suggest, consistent 
with the substance of them, I will gladly attend 
to the suggestion. My only object is to effect an 
arrangement that may conduce to the peace and 
comfort of all parties, in the most distressing case 
that ever fell within my knowledge. I feel as- 
sured that I have influence enough to accomplish 
it with one party, if I can bring the other to a 
full conviction of her duty, no less than her in- 
terest. 

' ' But still I cannot, even in self-respect, un- 
dertake the office of mediator on any tei-ms but 
such as I feel are honestly due to Lady Byron. 
I personally know the motive as well as the extent 
of the kindness that she has shown to Miss Leigh, 
and there are very few, certainly not more than 
three, who know it as well. She has desei'ved 
all that is grateful and all that is respectful at 
Miss Leigh's hands; and therefore, till her feel- 
ings are consulted and satisfied, so far as under 
the present unfortunate circumstances they can be, 
I will never approach her, or any of her family, 
as an intercessor for further assistance. Indeed, 
from her, personally, I can expect nothing, un- 
less it is to co-operate with others in doing what 
actual necessity seems to require ; but I am con- 
fident that none of the high circle to whom my 
appeal must be made, if made at all, will move 
in the matter except full atonement is first made 
to her justly woimded feelings. 
" I remain. Sir, 

" Yours very obediently, 

" George Stephen. 
"T. S , Esq." 



In addition to the conversation of Mr. S 

Avith Sir George Stephen, in reference to Miss 
Leigh's distress to which this letter is a formal 
reply, an intimation was thrown out, in subse- 
quent interviews between the parties, that the 
wealthy families with whom Miss Leigh was so 
closely related, coidd not, as a matter of delicacy 
and honour, allow a by no means wealthy stranger, 
like Captain De B , to remain without reim- 
bursement of the small simis — small in them- 
selves, though comparatively large to a gentle- 
man in his humble circumstances — which he had 
expended on her behalf, to secure her from the 
positive deprivation of food, and the commonest 
necessaries of life; or perhaps, if he had not 
taken her so generously in hand, from the work- 
house or the streets. On the 7th of July, Mr. 

S wrote to Lord Lovelace, with whom he 

had some previous acquaintance, on this subject. 
Two days aftenvards, his lordship replied, in a 
note dated from Ockham Park, that, "as Cap- 
tain De B had had the advantage of one or 

two personal interviews with Lady Byron's solicit- 
or, in consequence of his (Captain De B 's) 

application to her ladyship, and as no aiTange- 
ment had resulted therefrom, he (Lord Lovelace) 
must decline to enter into any communication 

with Mr. S upon the subject ; the more so 

as Captain De B 's intenention in the matter 

was wholly uninitiated by Lady Noel Byi'on, and 
by himself (Lord Lovelace). " 

Mr. S , still earnest in the cause, both of 

Captain De B and of the unfortunate Miss 

Leigh, endeavoured, without altogether losing 
heart and hope, to work yet a little further upon 
the kindly feelings of Sir George Stephen — whose 
letter showed a disposition, stronger perhaps in 
the man than in the lawyer, to assist an unfortu- 
nate woman — so as to bring his great and un- 
doubted influence to bear upon his noble clients. 
Nothing, however, came of these attempts and 
these interviews, for the reason that both Lady 
Byron and Miss Leigh were equally firm — if ob- 
stinate be not the better word — on the subject of 
the ' ' Deed of Appointment." Lady Byron re- 
fused to be reconciled to Miss Leigh, or to have 
anything to do with her, unless that document 
were sun'endered ; and Miss Leigh refused, point- 
blank, to surrender it on any conditions what- 
ever. Finally on the 4th of September, 1843, 
after an interval of nearly four weeks spent in 

these fraitless negotiations, Mr. S wrote to 

Sir George Stephen, in reply to that gentleman's 
letter of the 9th of August. In this document 
he deplored the imsatisfactory result of the ne- 
gotiations, and expressed both his regret and 
surprise, that Lady Byron should not only have 
hardened her heart against one whom she had 
fomierly treated as if she had been her own child, 
but that her family and connections, and the hus- 
band of her daughter Ada, who had been Miss 
Leigh's playmate in childliood, should, on a 



A HISTORY AND AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



29 



punctilio of offended dignity, allow Captain De 

B 's Christian benevolence to be a drain upon 

a pocket that was far less capacious than his hu- 
man sympathy. It was nearly a mouth after the 
receipt of Sir George Stephen's communication, 
during which time Miss Leigh had repeatedly 
expressed her willingness to do anything that 
was required of her by Lady Byron, with the 
sole exception of dehvering up her mother's Deed 
of Appointment, that Mr. S wrote the fol- 
lowing letter to Lady Byron's solicitor [Sir 
George Stephen] : — 

" September 4, 1S43. 

" Sir, — I have so fully communicated to you 
in conversation the sentiments of Miss Leigh 
upon the conditions which you think would 
through your mediation again procure her the 
means of existence from Lady Byron, that it is 
now perhaps supei-fluous to acknowledge formally 
the receipt of your letter of the 9th August. 
But as, to my deep regret, and I will ever say to 
my utter astonishment, the spirit of all that I 
have heard on the part of Lady Byron has been 
so different from what I think there was reason 
to expect, I deem it advisable to state in writing 
that Miss Leigh has always been willing, with or 
without countervailing advantage to herself, to 
make any acknowledgments, and to express any 
contrition, that might be required by Lady Bp'on, 
and to come under any reasonable obligation as 
to her future mode of hfe; — so that, although 
thei'e was nothing in your offers which could be 
regarded as a definite undertaking that certain 
results would follow compliance with certain 
teims, two of your three conditions were unhesi- 
tatingly accepted. 

" With regard to the third. Miss Leigh is most 
desirous of presening entire for herself and her 
child the provision in her mother's Deed of Ap- 
pointment ; but she objects to put it irrevocably 
under the control of other persons, without some 
equally irrevocable obligation for her support ade- 
quate to the surrender which she would thereby 
make. 

" It is, therefore, solely upon this her objection, 
that I must presume Lady Byron continues in 
her determination to abandon her to want and 
miseiy, insisting upon the surrender of the Deed 
as a test of the sincerity of Miss Leigh's I'epent- 
ance. 

' ' Having due regard to the relative positions 
of the parties, and in particular to Lady B3Ton's 
past benevolence and maternal interest in this 
unfortunate young lady, it is difficult to say that, 
as far as Ladv Byron's personal feelings are in 
question, this is an unreasonable requisition, nor, 
as Miss Leigh showed by having unasked left the 
Deed in Lady Byron's custody, would she have 
hesitated to have left it again with her, had she 
been restored to her favor ; — but, on the other 
hand, taking Miss Leigh's personal feehngs, her 



present position, and her wrongs into considera- 
tion, it surely is not surprising that she should 
object to part with the only property in the world 
that she can call her own, for no retm'n whicli 
change of opinion or of circumstances may not 
wrest from her as suddenly and unexpectedly as 
in the recent instance of Lady Byron's abandon- 
ment. 

"It is not for me to express any opinion on 
the course adopted by the principal parties in 
this very painful and singular case. I have the 
misfortune to differ widely from you as to the de- 
gree of cidpability attributable to the offending 
party, and though assured by you of the existence 
of many causes of offence, I have fiiiled in ob- 
taining a specification of any beyond that for 
which I must ever think there was much exten- 
uation, while the imparting of the power of of- 
fending in the particular way alluded to, would 
assuredly be viewed by third parties as of very 
questionable propriety. 

"But with regard to the branch of the subject 
which brought me into connection with it, name- 
ly, the intei-vention of Captain De B to save 

]\Iiss Leigh and her child from actual want, I 
may be pennitted to express my amazement — 
and I cannot imagine any discreet and reason- 
able person not participating in it — that by the 
cold denial of his claim for reimbursement Lady 
Byron and her family should have necessitated 
the disclosure which Captain De B felt him- 
self bound to make to his agents, of the circum- 
stances under which he was placed by such an 
unlooked-for result of his readiness to assist an 
English lady in distress. That this denial has 
been the cause of whatever Lady Byron and her 
family may think themselves aggrieved by since 
our intervention, there is not, and there cannot 
be, the shadow of a doubt. From an expression 
in Lord Lovelace's letter to me, it might be in- 
ferred that his lordship looks upon Captain De 

B 's inten'ention as impertinent and officious, 

and as if some permission should have been asked 
before money was paid for IMiss Leigh. I can- 
not understand this idea. Captain De B 

accidentally met a lady whom he had known as 
a neighbour, without present means of subsistence, 
in Paris, but who, from letters and obligations 
to a large pecuniary amount, he saw was connect- 
ed with one of the most distinguished ladies in 
England. He refused to enquire further into her 
circumstances, her relationship, or her past his- 
toiy, but, relying on the name and character of 
Lady Byron, he paid, and has continued to pay, 
for the subsistence of one whom he found her 
ladyship had been treating as 'her other child.' 
For this he received an enquiring visit from a so- 
licitor, and an impression was taken of his motives 
and conduct, of which I am much mistaken if 
Lady Byron and her firmily have not already 
discovered the erroneousness, and possibly mny 
alreadv feel regi-et for having entertained. 



30 



MEDORA LEIGH; 



" I conclude this too long letter by asserting 
emjihatically tliat the earnest desire of Captain 
De B and his friends was to prevent the in- 
fliction of a single painful sensation on Lady B}'- 
ron's mind, either from the effects of present re- 
velations, or of future consequences of them. 
Deeply deploring our utter failure in this object, 
" I have the honor to be, &c. 

"T. S." 

We have now ai'rived at that stage in the nar- 
rative, when it becomes necessary to let Medora 
Leigh speak for herself, and unfold, in her own 
style and language, what were the peculiar claims 
she had upon the affection and generosity of Lady 
Byron, other than that she was in deep poverty 
and atHiction ; and that she was really and truly 
her niece by marriage, and the daughter of Lord 
Byron's sister. She wrote out and placed in the 
hands of ]\Ir. S , that he might know — how- 
ever painful and discreditable to herself they 
might be — all the circumstances of her life 
from her fifteenth year, when all her errors and 
all her sorrows commenced, in the shape of 
an autobiographical memoir. This memoir is 
the saddest story of a young, erring, deceived, 
and repentant girl, that perhaps was ever laid 
bare to the scrutiny of a harsh and imforgiving 
world. Like the last mournful confession of a 
culprit at the point of death, and almost at the 
bar of eternity, it concealed nothing, either as 
affected herself or others ; opened her heart, as 
if it were a cabinet into which all the world might 
peer and examine, either for monstrosities or cu- 
riosities ; and brought the most fearful accusations 
against the mother who bore her, and her elder 
sister, whom she more particularly charged with 
being the origin of all her calamities and degra- 
dations. After long doubt and hesitation — the 
maturest consideration, and consultation with 
others to whom the circumstances are known, 
and Avho have perused Miss Leigh's manuscripts 
— the editor of this volume decided to reproduce 
it in its entirety, on account of tlie light which it 
throws upon the one great matter of present con- 
troversy — the charge brought by Lady Bj^ron 
and Mrs. Stowe against Lord Byron's mem- 
oiy — the only matter in which it can really in- 
terest the public of this or any other day. Not 
to create M-hat is called a sensation — not to pan- 
der to scoundrel curiosity — not to feed the greedy 
maw of scandal, that loves to prey upon the rep- 
utation of the great, the exalted, and the gifted ; 
but in the interest of truth, irrespective of all or 
any whom the truth may touch, and with the 
fullest reliance that no one truth can ever contra- 
dict or be antagonistic to any other truth, the 
story of the erring and unhappy child of Lord 
Byron's sister will now be told, as it affects INIrs. 
Leigh, Lady Noel Byron, and the minor charac- 
ters that revolve around these two. Lord Byron 
himself she never saw ; and if Lord Byron ever 



saw her — which is nowhere recorded by Lord 
Byron, or others, that we can discover — it must ' 
have been as an infant in the cradle; for she 
was born in 1815, and in 1816 Lord Byron 
quitted England, never again to return. He 
never again saw either his daughter Ada, or that 
beloved sister Augusta, about his affection for 
whom such awful charges have been piled 
against his memory. Miss Leigh's narrative is 
for the most part written in her own neat hand 
— small and ladylike — and shows in every sen- 
tence the composition of an educated, but cer- 
tainly not of a literary lady. The later portion 
of the manuscript is in another hand, is not so 
grammatical, or so orthographically correct as 
the previous portion, and ai3pears to have been 
dictated to an amanuensis, while she was suffer- 
ing from illness. 

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

' ' I am the fourth child of a family of seven. 
[Miss Leigh does not mention her own name or 
that of her mother at the commencement of her 
narrative, but plunges at once, in Homeric f:xsh- 
ion, into the detail of the events which decided 
her fate.] My eldest sister, Georgiana, married 
Mr. Henry Trevanion, a distant cousin, in 1826, 
when I was eleven years old. The marriage, 
which had met the approbation of no one except 
my mother, did not turn out very happilj^, owing 
to the smallness of fortune, and the uneven tem- 
per of both parties. I was frequentlj^ called in 
to keep them company, and in March, 1829 (after 
they had been married three years), it was decid- 
ed that I should accompany them to a country 
house which had been placed at their disposal by 
my aunt Annabella, Lady Byron, during the 
time of my sister's approaching confinement. 
The house was in the neighbourhood of Canterr 
bury. The last injunctions and admonitions I 
received from my mother on starting, Avere to 
devote myself in all things to please my brother- 
in-law, Mr. Trevanion ; to get rid of the dislike I 
entertained for him, and to cease ridiculing him, 
as I had been in the habit of doing. I was 
urged more particularly to this course of beha- 
viour in consideration not alone of his delicate 
health, but of the poverty which made him pecu- 
liarly sensitive. I promised compliance, and ac- 
companied them to the countrj', as my mother 
and sister had arranged. My sister's illness, be- 
foi-e her confinement, was the occasion of my be- 
ing left much alone with Mr. Trevanion. In- 
deed, I found myself thrown entirely upon liim 
for society. T was with him both in-doors and 
out, by day and by night, and was frequently sent 
by my sister into his bedroom on errands, after 
every one else in the house had retired to rest. 
Some months passed in this manner, during which 
Mr. Trevanion took advantage of my youth 
anel weakness, and effected my ruin, and I found 
myself likely to become a mother, by one I had 



A HISTORY AND AN AUTOBIOGEAPIIY. 



31 



ever disliked. Mr. Trevanion, when made aware 
of my position, implored me to tell Georgiana 
the truth, and throw him and myself upon her 
mercy. I did so. My misery and my repent- 
ance appeared to move her much ; and she 
blamed herself for having thrown me so much in 
Henry's (Mr. Trevanion's) way. I was but fifteen 
years of age at this time — in the year 1830. My 
sister concerted with her husband as to the steps 
to be taken, and it was agreed between them that 
they shoidd ask my mother's opinion to take me 
abroad along with them. Permission was ob- 
tained without much difficulty, and when I was 
within three or four months of my confinement, 
I was taken by them to Calais. The misery and 
anguish of mind which I suffered contributed, 
along with my weak state of health, to bring on 
a premature confinement ; and I was delivered 
clandestinely, under my sister's roof, of a male 
child, wliich was taken away, to be brought up 
under the charge of the medical gentleman who 
attended me. Three months afterwards, when 
my health was partially restored, Mr. and Mrs. 
Trevanion returned to England with me — they 
to the house of an aunt, and I to the house of my 
mother. My mother did not appear to have a 
suspicion of any kind. Mr. Trevanion came 
very often — almost daily — to see me, and his vis- 
its were not in any way discouraged by my moth- 
er. My mother, at this time, endeavoured to 
force me, much against my wish, into society and 
balls, though I endeavoured to excuse myself on 
account of my extreme youth, and by the fact 
that I was in mourning for another sister whom 
we had recently lost. [Here Miss Leigh enters 
into the details of some efforts that she was in- 
formed were made, in some unaccountable and 
very mysterious way, by the then Lord Byron, 
or a person deputed by him, to discover the facts 
connected with the birth of her child ; and of her 
being informed by the doctor at Calais, who had 
taken charge of it, that it had died at three 
months old of convulsions. She goes on to say] : — 
During the whole autumn and winter of this 
year I was constantly left in Henry's (Treva- 
nion's) society ; and early in 1831, I, for the 
second time, found myself likely to become a 
mother. He begged and entreated me to con- 
fide in my mother, and v/rote a letter, which I 
copied and signed, in which I invoked her assist- 
ance in my trouble. She burned this letter as 
soon as she read it, and was at first very kind to 
me ; though she aftenvards became very cruel. 
It was finally agreed between her and Georgi- 
ana, that I should leave London and accompany 
my sister and her husband into the country : I was 
not told what part. This was in March, 1831. 
In June of the same year, or three months after- 
wards, Colonel Leigh* unexpectedly arrived at the 
countiy house, preceded by an attorney anda sher- 

* Her supposed father, and the husband of Mrs. Leigh. 



iff's officer.* These parties having gained admit- 
tance. Colonel Leigh drove up to the door in a 
travelling carriage. His old coachman was on the 
box, and a woman, intended to represent a lady's 
maid, sat inside. Wliat ensued was great misery 
to me. I then believed, though I had been told 
the contrary by my sister and her husband, that 
Colonel Leigh Avas my father. I wished to 
spare him the knowledge of my shame. We 
were never, any of us, taught to love and honour 
him. But, strange to say, I was his favourite 
cliild, and had greater influence over him than 
any one when he was violent, and would have 
done anything to liide his faidts or spare his feel- 
ings. I was allowed to have ten minutes' pri- 
vate conversation alone with Henry, during which 
he exacted a promise from me that I would es- 
cape as soon as possible from my mother, and run 
away with him. Colonel Leigh proposed to take 
me home with him, and sent me to ray room to 
prepare for my journey while the carriage wait- 
ed. I found Georgiana in my room, apparently 
in great distress of mind. She begged forgive- 
ness of me if she had done me any wrong, as- 
sured me that she would immediately procure a 
divorce, and that then I could many Henry if 
disposed to do so. Colonel Leigh showed much 
emotion, as did eveiy one present ; but all his 
grief seemed dispelled at the first turnpike, in his 
eagerness to pass crooked far thiiigs.^ 

"At 12 o'clock at night we arrived in London, 
and stopped somewhere in the neighbourhood of 
Oxford Street, where Colonel Leigh dismissed 
his ovm. carriage, called a hackney-coach from 
the stand, and made me enter it along with him. 
We were driven I know not whither, until we ar- 
rived at a house where I was given into the 
charge of a lady. The windows of the room 
into which I was put were securely nailed and 
fastened down, and there were outside chains and 
bolts, and other fastenings to the door. There 
was eveiy show and ostentation of a prison. 
During my confinement in this piace. Colonel 
Leigh came to see me three times, when I de- 
clined to see him any more. My mother came 
once. Some religious books were sent to me by 
one of my aunts, I forget which. After a fort- 
night, when one day, looking into the street from 
the closed window, I recognised Trevanion driv- 
ing by with Georgiana, he -saw me ; and after- 
wards, for another fortnight, continued to drive 
by almost eveiy day. Notes were sewed in my 
linen when it came from the wash, I did not 
know by whom, but I suspected by m^ sister. 
By this means I was enabled to understand the 
signs he made to me when he drove past the 
house. One day the lady to whose care I had 

* Miss L:igh, in her ignorance of the world, appears to 
have mistaken a doctor, or a Iceeper from a private lunatic 
asylum, for a sheriff's officer. 

t The meaning of this plirase, if it have any, ia difScult 
to explain. — Editor. 



32 



MEDORA LEIGH ; 



been entrusted told me that if I liked to Avalk 
out of the house nobody would stop me, and 
showed me how to remove the chains affixed to 
the door. I did not hesitate in any choice be- 
tween two evils, but at once put on my bonnet, 
followed her instructions, and found Trevanion 
outside Availing to receive me. We left the 
street with all possible haste and secrecy, which 
we might have spared ourselves, as nobody at- 
tempted to follow us. 

" We made our way to the Continent, and for 
two years after this time lived together as man 
and wife on the coast of Normandy, under the 
assumed name of Monsieur and Madame Aubin. 
My sister applied for the divorce as promised, 
but Trevanion informed me some time after that 
it could not be obtained. An active correspond- 
ence of some kind was kept up between him 
and his wife, perhaps about the divorce, and the 
Earl of Chichester wrote to him several times, 
lU'ging his separation from me ; and though I 
never read their letters, I was told by Trevanion 
Avhat they were about, and that he and Lord 
Chichester could not agree. At last, however, 
as my health grew more and more delicate every 
day, and as Trevanion began to lose hope that I 
should ever bear a living child, he agreed to my 
wish that we should separate. I wrote to my 
mother informing her of my earnest desire and 
intention to enter as a boarder in a convent in 
Lower Brittany. The letter remained unan- 
swered for a considerable time ; but after much 
delay and difficulty, I left Trevanion and entered 
a convent, my mother engaging to allow me £60 
a year. But I was again likely to become a 
mother. And now my greatest hope was that I 
might in some way be able to conceal the deli- 
cate state of my health, Avhich forbad the hope 
that the child would live. Other circumstances 
combined with this to make me leave the con- 
vent, which I did with the permission of the ab- 
bess, who also allowed me to have my letters ad- 
dressed there as usual. I had the hope of entei'- 
ing another convent, at a later time when I 
shoidd have no reason to leave it, and I did not 
feel that I was doing wrong. Trevanion was not 
under the same roof with me, and from the time 
I entered the convent I never was but as a sister 
to him. After eight months I gave birth to my 
little girl (who still lives), to II. 's (Trevanion's) 
great joy. At that time an uncle of H.'s vmder- 
took to come and see him ; and he, discovering 
that I was no longer in a convent, wrote to my 
mother. We (Trevanion and I) continued to 
live on, in an old chateau, in a secret and unfre- 
quented spot, in great poverty, but as brother 
and sister. Henry at this time gave himself up 
wholly to religion and shooting ; I to my child. 
We never met alone, and seldom met at all. 
Sixteen months afterwards poverty forced H. to 
go to England, and after an absence of six 
weeks he returned with money. Then I saw 



remains of what I had thought AvhoUy extin- 
guished ^- his passionate attachment to me. 
But I was no longer a child — I was twen- 
ty-one ; and two years' experience had enabled 
me to know how to resist. I pass over three 
years of misery ; but I am Avilling to give ever}' 
detail of what I was made to suffer, though I 
do not think it is absolutely necessary to do so. 
In the spring of 1838, the hardships I had en- 
dm-ed caused me to fall dangerously ill ; and af- 
ter some days my life, contrary to aU expecta- 
tion, was saved, though I was declared to be 
in a consumption, Avithout hope of living beyond 
a few months. The medical man who attended 
me was very kind, and the little experience of 
kindness which I had had during my lifetime, 
made me, at his solicitation, confide to him my 
real history. I asked his aid to free me from 
the cruelty of one whom I had never really 
loved, and who by his conduct eveiy day con- 
vinced me more and more of his worthlessness. 
My greatest wish was to die away from him. 
Through Mr. C.'s means* I wrote to my moth- 
er, and my aunt. Lady Chichester, informing 
them of my position, and imploring the means 
to free myself. I obtained £5, left Trevanion's 
roof, and went to the neighbouring town, where 
I continued to receive most affectionate letters 
from my mother, but very little money. I en- 
deavoured to persuade her to allow me regularly 
£120 per annum — the smallest sum I could live 
on in a very cheap place. She promised, but 
did not perform ; so that after a year and a half 
I found I should be compelled, as I was advised 
to do, to sell the reversion to £3000 which I had, 
with some difficulty, obtained as a provision for 
my child, after my death, if I did not M-ish to be 
forced to return to Mr. Trevanion. During some 
months the correspondence between myself and 
my mother continued as affectionate as ever, I 
endeavouring all the while to obtain from her 
the means of existence, and she retaining tlie 
Deed. At length I wrote to my aunt. Lady 
Chichester, who had sent me the £5, begging 
her influence to obtain the Deed for me, and to 
Sir George Stephen, to whom I had applied to 
sell the reversion, stating that I was sure my 
aitnt. Lady Noel Byron, would use any influence 
she might possess with my mother, to induce her 
to give up to me that which was my right. Some 
months previously, on my having implored inter- 
ference from England to save me from Mr. Tre- 
vanion's tyranny and persecution, Sir R. Horton 
proposed to me that he (Trevanion) should \>q 
thrown into prison for a debt which he had con- 
tracted to Lady Noel Byron, at the time of liis 
marriage, and wliich sum alone liad enabled the 
marriage to take place. I was well aware that 
it Avas understood that this sum Avas ncA^er to be 
repaid. Sir R. Horton assured me of Lady By- 

* The medical gentleman alluded to, whose name is not 
fully given by Miss Leigh. 



A HISTOKY AND AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



ron's consent to such a measure. I openly ex- 
pressed my opinion of such a dislionourable trans- 
action. I rejected such interference, and even 
informed Mr. Trevanion of what had been pro- 
posed to me, in order that he might guard against 
what was neither honourable nor just. On Sir 
George Stephen forwarding my letter to Lady 
Byron, I received a most kind and affectionate 
letter from Lady Byron, and money, with offers 
of protection for myself and child, and the power 
of quitting a neighbourhood which was most 
painful to me. This was in August, 1840. I 
willingly and joyfully accepted these offers, and 
accompanied a medical gentleman whom Lady 
Byron had sent, and met her at Tours, where it 
was first thought I should reside. Lady Byron, 
however, proposed that I should accompany her 
to Paris, and remain with her for a time. I did 
so, being desirous of attending to the least wishes 
of one towards whom I had reason to feel so 
grateful. 

"At Fontaineblean, where she was detained 
by illness. Lady Byron informed me of the cause 
of the deep interest she felt, and must ever feel, 
forme. Her husband had been my father. She 
implored and sought my affection by every means ; 
and almost exacted my confidence to the most un- 
limited extent, I was willing and anxious, in 
any and every way I could, to prove both my 
gratitude and the desii'e I so sincerely felt to re- 
pay by my affection and devotion any pain she 
must have felt for circumstances connected with 
my birth and her separation from Lord Byron. 
Her only wish, she said, was to provide for me, 
according to Lord Byron's intentions respecting 
me, and according to my rank in life. She 
evinced much anxiety for my health and comfort, 
expressed indignation for all I had suffered, spoke 
of the comfort I would be to her, and of the ne- 
cessity that I should be a devoted child to her. 
There was a Chancery suit begun against my 
mother, to obtain possession of the Deed. All 
these circumstances decided me on staying with 
Lady Byron till that should be settled. I re- 
ceived money from her in small sums and pres- 
ents, but nothing M-as definitely settled. We 
contimied nine or ten months in Paris. At the 
latter period of this time, Ada and Lord Love- 
lace came over, and I received kindness and 
promises from both, and was made to feel that I 
was to be Ada's sister in all things, as I was real- 
ly. In May, 18-11, 1 accompanied Lady Byron 
to England, and remained for a few months, 
during whicii she showed me letters of Lord By- 
ron, relating to her separation, which, as she af- 
terwards said, might be useful in the Chancery 
suit. Mistreatment of an illness rendered me 
too ill to quit England that autumn without great 
difficulty and expense, which I was always anx- 
ious to avoid. All this rendered me the more 
desirous to comply with Lady Byron's earnest 
wish that I should not leave her, which, she used 
3 



to say, would cost her her life. Even after my 
experience I could not believe (though her tem- 
per caused me great misery, and her strange ar- 
rangements were often most painful) that all hei- 
affection was assumed. In May, 1842, my long 
anxiety in the matter of the Chancery suit was 
ended. The suit Mas concluded in a way, with- 
out considtation with me, that showed rae that 
all that had been promised me, unsolicited and 
unsought, was not sincere, and that I had been 
in a manner sacrificed in my mother's interest. 
I openly expressed to Lady Byron all I felt, and 
my detennination of leaving England immediate- 
ly, and solicited from her (Lady Byron) the 
means to do so. She again continued, as ever, 
saying that it was for her to provide as Lord By- 
ron would have done, &c., &c. But on finding 
that the impressions I had received were not to 
be done away with, she spoke of the necessity of 
my having a lady to live with me abroad. This 
I rejected, because I knew of no one whose con- 
stant society I could wish for, and I had never 
given her in any way to believe that I could sub- 
mit to such. Matters continued unsettled, and 
my increasing ill-health made me desirous of 
immediately quitting England, and going to the 
South of France, where I had long been order- 
ed (by medical advice) to go. In July, 1842, 
there began a correspondence, talking of condi- 
tions, that I had never heard of till then, mform- 
ing me that Lady Byron would allow me £150 
per annum for my mamtenance, besides paying 
the wages of a lady's-maid that she and Lady 
Lovelace had engaged for me some months bt 
fore, and who had never lived but in the richest 
families. On being engaged for my seiwice she 
mentioned her particular desire of being with a 
lady whose conduct had ever been irreproacha- 
ble. This appeared so strong a wish on her part, 
and was so often expressed, that after a short 
time I told her M'hat she could not but have sus- 
pected, from all she was a witness of, that she 
liad better avail herself of the opportunity of 
quitting me, as my life and past history v.'ere not 
such as she would wish. She thanked me, re- 
fused to quit me, and assured me of her devotion 
under all circumstances. I informed Lady By- 
ron of my belief that it would be impossible for 
me to live where she proposed, at Hyeres, for £150 
per annum; that I would endeavour to do so, 
but that I would not, as in the past, suffer pover- 
ty and privation ; and that whatever sum in ad- 
dition (to the £150) should be necessary for my 
health and Marie's education, I shoidd endeavour 
to procure in some other way. To this she an- 
swered, ' IIow can you imagine I will ever let 
you want either ?' She assured me of her afi"ec- 
tion by words, and of her unmerited and unjust 
mistrust — by her actions, and by every arrange- 
ment she made for me, which seemed to me most 
ingeniously painful — such as exacting that my 
monev should be paid to the maid, and that she 



34 



MEDOKA LEIGH; 



shoiild expect to receive from her an account of 
the way in which the money was spent. This 
it was agreed 7ny servant should do. Lady By- 
ron sent me £40 to travel to Hyeres with, recom- 
mending me to travel in the most comfortable 
way, &c. I was anxious not to judge hastily, but 
trusted that when Lady Byron's health improved 
(she was ill), she would be more just and reason- 
able. I also was ill, and asked Lady Byron, as 
my maid-servant suggested I should do, that I 
should have a man-sei-vant to travel with me. 
Lady Byron consented, and my maid's husband, 
being out of place, was fixed upon. After con- 
sultation with Ada and Lord Lovelace, it was 
tliought best I should leave, and Ada promised, 
and I thought I might trust to such, to watch 
over and protect me, assuring me her mother was 
deeply attached to me. I trusted to this, and 
left England on Friday evening, the 22nd of 
July, 1842. And partly in order to prove to 
Lady Byron my earnest wish to please her still, 
and on my maid's solicitation on account of their 
importance, in the event of my death, I left a box 
of letters and papers with Lady Noel Byron's 
housekeeper, to be given to Lady Byron on her 
return to Moore Place ; and ths Deed of Ap- 
pointment to Ada on her leaving me at G o'clock 
that evening, to be deposited with Lord Love- 
lace's ])apers at Ockham. The Deed I had kept 
till then in my own possession, and intended do- 
ing so, fearing to let it again escape me.* The 
letters and papers are all most important to me. 
Lady Byron had asked me to, and by my promise 
made me, leave them to her by my will. And 
when she begged me only a few days previously, 
never to mistrust her affection, I thought this 
would convince her (that I did not do so). AVhen 
she never acknowledged their receipt in any let- 
ter, I was still far from suspecting she would do 
what she is now doing — making her lawyer give 
evasive answers, and denying me what I entrust- 
ed with confidence to her honour." 

[The concluding portion of Miss Leigh's nar- 
rative is not in her own handwriting, and appears 
to have been written to her dictation. It is by 
no means so clear, so consecutive, or so gram- 
matical as the preceding parts of the story — facts 
which are possibly to be accounted for by Miss 
Leigh's ill-health, and the inattention or inex- 
perience in composition, of her amanuensis.] 

" Though! travelled as expeditiously as my 
health allowed — 'and much more so — on arriving 
at Lyons, there was not money enough to pay 
the boat, &c. ; and from the arrangements, much 
difficulty in obtaining tlie £37 from the bankers 
there. After three days we proceeded on our 

* It would appear from thi?, though Miss Leigh omitted 
to mention the fact in its proper place in her narrative, 
that hy means of tlie Chancery suit she liad recovered the 
Deed from her mother. — Ed. 



journey, but on arriving al Hyeres we were again 
without (money). I wrote, and my maid also 
wrote, as she had been requested to do, in case 
of increased illness ; and Lady Byron was inform- 
ed of my indisposition most fully, and of all ex- 
penses and probabilities of such. She approved, 
and continued her terms of affection as ever ; 
engaged to neglect no expense for my health ; 
wished me to get masters for Marie's education ; 
to hire carriages, &c., for my driving out, and 
said she woitld send me books from England. 
I insisted most minutely on expense,* and en- 
deavoured most earnestly to avoid all. And when 
Lady Byron suggested my moving elsewhere to 
a cheaper place, I adopted all I was capable of — 
that of approaching Toulon. To concur in all 
her Avishes, a country-house about three-quarters 
of a league from Toulon was hired. I ^vrote, as 
well as my man-servant — sending the accounts 
monthly, with every detail. She (Lady Byron) 
approved of all ; but in November wrote concern- 
ing the rent of the house of which I told my 
man-servant, who was responsible, and whom 
Lady Byron wished to stay with me till further 
notice. He got certificates as to the rent being 
far from unreasonable, from the mayor of Hyeres, 
and from an English gentleman residing near. 
These satisfied Lady Byron, or seemed to do so, 
and though she always said he (the man-servant) 
was to go, her non-pajTnent of what she had 
agreed to give him prevented his doing so. She 
received the monthly expenses (accounts) from 
him; and, though I neither complied with all 
her wishes that I should incur expense, and de- 
prived myself and child of all I possibly could, 
it was not possible that they should not exceed 
£150 a year. She expressed no dissatisfaction. 
We were always without money, from all being 
spent and much owing, before any more arrived. 
But all this she was well aware of, through her 
own arrangements, of knowing how the money 
was spent and all I was in want of. In Decem- 
ber she expressed dissatisfaction, and accused me 
of rendering all the money arrangements as vex- 
atious as possible to her, as may be seen in her 
correspondence. She exacted receipts from me 
of all the sums that had been paid, sa\-ing I had 
received them in the name of my maid. I wrote 
briefly back, regretting only that she coidd say or 
think what was so far from being true." 

[At this point the narrative becomes so con- 
fused as to be all but unintelUgible ; but it is re- 
printed verbatim et literatim, in order that possi- 
ble injustice may not be done by any attempt to 
put it into a shape that might be erroneous.] 

' ' The bankers who paid the money informed 
them it was paid by Lady Noel Byron's orders 

* Thus in the original; but evidently from the context 
meaning, " on not incuning expense."— Eu. 



A HISTORY AND AN AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 



35 



— her own arrangements having been what she 
accused me of; and refused, till I heard further, 
giving the signature required. From her answer 
— in which she informed me of the necessity of 
having that signature to answer the malicious 
interpi'etation her conduct, from peculiar circum- 
stances, might be guilty of towards me, and 
which my signature alone could answer — and 
also finding she would send more to answer the 
GOO francs due for the rent she had long been 
aware must be paid by the 20th of December ; 
and, being without any, I gave the signatm-e of 
my maid's ha%-ing foithfully paid me the several 
sums, and at the same time asked for £20, nec- 
essary for an arrangement for my little girl's ed- 
ucation. She sent the money necessaiy for the 
rent, which my man-servant had paid from what 
she had sent a few days previously to pay him. 
I never saw the letters that passed from her to 
him, and ha^dng had no control whatever over 
the money paid for my maintenance, neither ever 
having clearly understood its application, cannot 
explain it. But M'hen I received Lady Byron's 
answer to me — she should pay him no further 
after the 1st of Januaiy — I told him so. He 
laughed, and said by her letters to him, she must 
write so to him, and assured me of his devotion, 
&c., to me, and his intention of sooner than leav- 
ing me and his wife in the position Lady Byron 
placed us, to stay for nothing. I coidd say noth- 
ing. Lady Byron returned no answer to the 
£20 I had asked, but sent expressions of aifec- 
tion, &c., which I could neither trust nor value. 
My maid and her husband urged me, and rec- 
ommended me most stronglj^, by eveiy means in 
their power, fb profit by the money he had re- 
ceived, and go to Paris while yet I was able, and 
there endeavour to obtain a more certain and 
suitable arrangement. After reflection, I agreed 
to do so. They protested much devotion — prom- 
ised me much — and, insupportable as was my 
position, I caught at the straw thus offered me, 
and was very grateful for it. In March, 1843, I 
went to Paris, of which I informed Lady Byron 
as brieflj' as possible, and consulted M. Berryer, 
who promised to write and use his influence, 
which he did not doubt would succeed. Finding 
that he delayed, I wrote to Lady Byron, and ex- 
plained why I came to Paris. To this I received 
no answer, but a visit from Miss Davison, to 
tell me I must beg Lady Byron's pardon, and 
assure me of her afl'ection.* I waited an answer 
to my letter. My seiwants wrote ; Mons. Ber- 
ryer waited ; and thus things continued till the 
beginning of May. Lady Byron in the mean- 
time wrote to my servants, accusing them of 
having forwarded my going to Paris, which they 
denied ; and also accusing my maid of not hav- 
ing fulfilled the oflSce of spy, which she had 



* It seems as if the pronouns were misplaced in this 
passage, and that it sliould read, " and assure her oi my 
affection." — Ed. 



undertaken to fill. This my maid denied, and 
also refused to quit me in such a position, as ex- 
acted by Lady Byron. Lady Byron also wrote 
to the master of the hotel, accusing me of what I 
had never done — of using her credit ; and telhng 
him all she coidd of the past histoiy of my life 
that could be unfavourable and painful. My 
sen'ants obtained money, once or twice, from a 
friend of Lady Byron, Miss Doyle, then in Paris ; 
and at length we were able to get lodgings. 
Early in May my maid came and told me, one 
Sunday afternoon, that Dr. King had come from 
Lady BjTon and had asked for Miss Leigh. I 
refused to see him, and told him to communicate 
with Mons. Beriyer, who at last — but only two 
or three days previously — had written to Lady 
Byron. He waited some time, and sent me in 
an accusation ;* and a proposal from Lady Byron 
that I should resign to her all control over my- 
self and child. This I instantly refused, and told 
him, through my maid and j\Ions. Berryer, that 
he might leave Paris within the forty-eight hours, 
as he threatened to do, for I should never sign. 
On the Wednesday he sent a humble, supplicating 
letter, asking to see me. To comply with Mons. 
Berryer's wish, I did so. He showed letters, &c. , 
on which, and after some days" calculation and 
divers propositions, he offered me £300 a year. 
To Mons. Berryer he promised what Mons. Ber- 
iyer desired [here the MS. again becomes con- 
fused], and was absolutely necessary for me to 
live on this sum, circumstanced as I was in Paris. 
^^^^at I already knew of Dr. King and m}' seeing 
him agreed. He was a great friend with my 
ser\'ants, M'hom he, when not present, blamed. 
The mission he had undertaken, together with 
his mode of fulfilling it, gave me no confidence. 
When he refused, I included what I knew could 
not be dispensed with, and that he had agreed to ; 
and attempted by intimidation to make me sign 
what I knew would not be fulfilled, and would 
therefore give rise to new complications which I 
was anxious to avoid, I refused to sign. I sub- 
mitted to all the abuse he M-as pleased to bestow 
— though it contributed all the more to make me 
refuse — when he said, 'Sign, sign, you great 
fool!' He left Paris the next morning; and on 
my writing to Messrs. Whai'ton to fonvard the 
Deed to Paris, to ISIons. Beriyer, they refused 
uidess I would send a person to them to receive 
it ; informing me at the same time that, had I 
signed, the conditions would not have been frd- 
filled; the same to Mons. Berryer, informing 
him that I had contracted the Deed on certain 
conditions. Lady Byron -wrote to my maid 
infoi-ming her of her illness. My maid decided 
on going to England to get paid for her hus- 
band, and told me of Mons. Benyer's advice 
that she should receive the Deed, for I could not 
go myself, not being well enough. I hesitated, 



Thus in the original. 



;3G 



MEDORA LEIGH; 



but gave her the authority which was necessary 
— having httle choice — an order authorizing her 
to receive the box of papers I M'as anxious for. 
I entrusted her with a letter to my mother, whom 
slie much urged me to address. I also gave her 
tlie name and direction of my family in case she 
should be in difficulties in England ; and it was 
agreed she should go tirst and consult Lady Ma- 
hon, whom she had been formerly recommended 
to. She obtained £5 for her journey from Miss 
Davison, and set oft". The letters which she wrote 
to me and her husband showed that she was not 
acting as had been agreed upon. I went with her 
letter to Mons. Bei-ryer, who recommended my 
going to Mr. Bulwer, of the British Embassy, 
who instantly said it was of the greatest impor- 
tance to prevent her getting possession of the 
Deed. I acted according to his instructions, and 
awaited the result of an interview he was to have 
with Mons. Berryer, who, he said, had not suffi- 
ciently considered the case. He recommended 
that I should conciliate Lady Byron ; but, above 
all, he distrusted my servants. They behaved most 
insolently, and every day my misery increased. 

Captain De B came to Paris and called 

upon me. He agreed Avith Mons. Berryer that I 
ought to go to England and conciliate Lady By- 
ron, if it were possible. He refused to listen to 
the details of my past life, or even to look at let- 
ters relating to my present. He liad onlj- known 
me in the South of France as Madame Aubin,and 
I had a grateful recollection of the kindness I had 
received from him as such, listened with confi- 
dence to the advice he gave me, acted in accord- 
ance with it, and by his means was enabled to 
come to England. I am still indebted to him 
for that and for my subsistence since my arrival. 
I have seen my maid since, whose behaviour in all 
things made me distrust her more and more ; 
and though I endeavoured to keep friends viitli 

hei", as Captain De B recommended, it was 

impossible to submit to the untnie accusations 
she made. My patience got exhausted one even- 
ing, since when I have heard no more of her, 
nor her charges of ingratitude. To these I can 
only say, for what am I to be grateful, either to 
Lady Byron, my mother, my sister, Mr. Trevan- 
ion, and, indeed, all who charge me with it ? 
Endness I feel ; but I do not fear having to an- 
swer this charge (of ingratitude) from Him who 
will demand an account of all. 

"Since I have been in London Sir George 
Stephen has called. I have received anonymous 
letters, and Lord Chichester has written twice re- 
questing me not to reject Lady Byron's kindness, 
liberalit}', and generosity, of all of wliich I am 
ignorant after the past, and Captain B 's in- 
terview with Mr. Wharton.* 

" This is a brief sketch of a long life of misery 



" The nature of tliis interview and its result?, if any, 
are not stated by Miss Le!gh. 



and sorrow. Whatever is not clear or too brief 
I can explain. I have done my best to make it 
clear, particularly in all that relates to Lady By- 
ron, whom, if I could, I would still believe kind 
in her intentions, though f:ir from kind in her ac- 
tions. Now, I cannot, though I would, say oth- 
erwise than that she has cruelly deceived me, and 
is as guilty in thus oppressing and driving me to 
the- utmost extremity as the mother, who has only 
made me the instrument to serve her avarice and 
the sacrifice to be made to those she feared. 

"(Signed) Elizabeth Medoka." 

In addition to this minute and painful narra- 
tive, that bears upon it the impress of truthfidness, 
as fiir as the belief and conviction of the writer 
are concerned — though coloured perhaps by her 
passion, her prejudices, or even her ignorance, or 
it might even be said, her innocence of the world 
and the world's ways, though she was by no means 
innocent of evil, and does not represent herself as 
being so — Miss Leigh wrote in a shorter fomi 
an epitome of the events of her unhappy life, 
which was forwarded by her to the Duke of 
Leeds, who, like herself, was a descendant of the 
Baroness Conyers, andtOMhom she had applied, 
as she did to many other relatives, for advice and 
assistance. »The copy of this letter was enclosed 
to Mr. S , by Captain De B , in the fol- 
lowing note, undated, but bearing the postmark 
of August 24th, 1843:— 

"Dear S , — Enclosed I send you a copy 

of what Miss Leigh yesterday wrote in answer to 
an enclosiu'e of £10 from the Duke of Leeds. He 
is the only one who has answered. I have been 
somewhat occupied, or I would have called. 

' ' Miss Leigh has been unwell, I presume from 
over-anxiety. Should anything transpire I Avill 
write or send to you. 

" Very truly yours, 

"J. DeB. 

"P.S. It is entirely her own composition. / 
did not like it." 

"• 8, Church Row, Old St. Pancras, 
"August 23, 1843." 

"Your Grace, — I beg most gratefully to ac- 
knowledge the receipt of the £10 you sent for the 
relief of my distress ; and, though fearing, from 
the briefness of its enclosure, to be deemed pre- 
suming or intrusive, the hard pressure of misery 
drives me to do that for Avhich I solicited yom* 
Grace's permission. 

" Ruined at the age of fifteen, hy the unprinci- 
pled man to whom I was exposed by those whose 
duty it was to watch over and protect me (and 
from whom I alone freed myself three years 
since), I unexpectedly found kindness and pro- 
tection for myself and child, from one whose sub- 
sequent conduct proves how deeply I Avas deceived 
in trusting to her as I did, gratefully and sincere- 
ly, and in gi\"ing what she sought— all I had to 



A HISTORY AND AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



give — unbounded confidence ; after giving more 
than I had long hoped to receive from those near 
to me — affection, and trying to waken in me, 
what I never possessed, a taste for the delicacies, 
&c., my broken health required, and which 
money alone can procure, and teaching me all I 
had yet to learn of the infomy of the mother, 
once so dearly loved, that I owed my birth to 
incest and adulteiy ; to impress on me the claims 
I had (which I did not seek) to be enabled to live 
according to the rank in life to which I ^^'as born, I 
found myself placed by her in a position not to be 
endured, dependent on servants over whom I had 
no control, unable to have what was necessary for 
my health, and refused what my child's education 
required ; and, in the endeavours I have made 
to save myself from such, have found destitution. 

"Though Mons. Benyer, Captain De B , 

and Mr. S , who have kindly endeavoui'ed to 

help me — the first by addressing Lady Byron on 
my behalf, the others in becoming the channels of 
communication denied directly to nie — have been 
met by distrust, almost by disdain ; three times 
have I, as I was wished, sought, humbly asked 
pardon, if I had displeased or pained by the step 
I had taken, to alter the position in which I had 
been placed. She who had shown me kindness, 
who had called me ' her other child,' and begged 
me, when in every other point she might en-, 
' never to mistrust her affection, which could not 
change,' has now unhesitatingly accused me of 
what has been proved untrue, and detained, and 
still detains, on false pretensions, what I entrust- 
ed to her care, and seeks, dares, and drives me to 
what I now do, to ask aid and protection from all. 
The only resource for existence I have is a Deed 
of Appointment for £3000, payable at the death 
of Lady Byron and my mother, the sole provis- 
ion made for me out of the large property she 
received from my father — and her brother — Lord 
Byron. For nearly three months I have been in- 
debted for the existence of myself and child to 
the kindness of those on whom I have no claim 
but pity, but who know me as I am, and not as 
those who have cast me on the world without 
home or protection would have me. 

" The distance at which your Grace is, renders 
it difficult to do as I should be anxious, to give 
all and every proof of the tmth of what I advance 
and which is known to those alike respected and 
respectable. I must beg your Grace's indulgence 
to what I now write, as I am suffering from 
the effects of over- exertion, not to deny me the 
protection I so much need. I could say much 
more, but almost a stranger as I am to your Grace, 
I can only beg you to consider my desolate and 
destitute position and its causes, and subscribe 
myself most gratefully, your grace's 

" Obedient humble servant, 
"E. M. Leigh. 

"His Grace the Duke of Leeds, 

" Mar Lodge, Braemar, N.B." 



Before writing this letter to the Duke of Leeds 
and making appbcation to various other relatives. 
Miss Leigh had made efforts to communicate 
with or see her mother. In a note from Captain 

DeB to Mr. S , dated the 15th of August, 

the former states : " Miss Leigh has not received 
any answer to any of her notes forwarded on Sat- 
urday. She called on her mother, but was re- 
fused. 'Not at home!' Miss Leigh has a Avish 
to fonvard the enclosed (three letters) ; perhaps 
you may be able to put the addresses upon them. 
Should anyi:hing transpire, I will lose no time in 
letting you know. If you should not approve of 
the letter to Mrs. Leigh, retain it." 

A memorandum on the back of Captain Dc 
B 's note, dated August 16, shows that its re- 
ceipt was acknowledged in the following terms 
next day : — 

' ' I received your note with Miss Leigh's three 

enclosures. We (Mr. S and his partner) think 

that to Mrs. Leigh is veiy proper and natural un- 
der the circumstances ; but is it not somewhat 
premature ? A day or two may make an impor- 
tant change, and we think a short time may yet 
be given for answers to the letters already sent. 
We retain them till we see or hear from you." 

Two of the letters were addressed to Miss 
Leigh's cousins, the Hon. D'Arcy Osborne, and 
the Hon. W. Osborne, and were as follow : — 

"3, Church Row, St. Pancras, 
" August 14, 1843. 
" When I was a happy child, you used to be 
kind and good-natured to me. Now that I am 
in suffering and miseiy, will you refuse me what 
I am compelled to ask of all who will give it me — 
aid and protection ? I am sure you will not, if 
you will let me tell you why I am so. 
"Your cousin, 

" Elizabeth Medora Leigh. 
" To tha Hon. Wm. Osborne." 



" S, Churcli Ko-w, St. Pancras, 
" August 14, 1S43. 
' ' I have thought that, though so many long 
years have gone by since we met, you will not 
have forgotten, or refuse to befriend, one you 
were once fond of; — destitute, alone in the world, 
forced to seek aid and protection from all who 
give it. I do not think you will refuse to listen 
and hear why I am so, and then accord me the 
help and assistance that are in your power. If I 
am mistaken in so thinking, forgive this applica- 
tion from your cousin, 

"Elizabeth Medora Leigh." 

The third letter, the one to Mrs. Leigh, is the 
most painful of all the documents in this unhappy 
case, and must have been written under deep feel- 
ings of irritation, caused by her mother's refusal 
to see her or admit her into her house. It is of 
such a nature, that, after mature deliberation, we 



38 



MEDORA LEIGH ; A HISTORY, ETC. 



have deemed it both expedient and proper to ex- 
clude it from these pages. 

Whether Mrs. Leigh were innocent of the 
charge against her — which we believe and shall 
attempt to prove hereafter — or guilty, of which 
there is no evidence, it was not likely that a let- 
ter such as this was, haughty, unfilial, and cruel, 
could have any effect in softening her heart to- 
wards her daughter. That it was actually sent 

to her appears from a letter of Captain De B 

to Mr. S , dated more than five weeks after- 
wards : 

" September 20, 1813. 

"Dear Sir, — Miss Leigh has not received any 
answer to her letter to her mother, and she now 
wishes to know if she shall make application to 
Sir F. Rowe, for a private interview. I have told 
her that I had not the least objection to accom- 
pany her, but that, unless asked for by Sir Fred- 
erick, I had no wish for my name going abroad. 

" She seems to say that both you and me (sic) 
promised to go with her to Sir Frederick. Is it 
your idea of the case ? If so, pray let me know. 
Her hopes to answers, as she expected, have turn- 
ed out, as I said, blanks. 

"I shall expect a few lines from you to-morrow 
morning. I would have called; but, to prevent 
misunderstanding, I would rather have your an- 
swer to this ; as she seems to think you and me 
were to be present at the interview with Sir Fred- 
erick. I remain, 

' ' Yours most trulv, 

"J. DeB ." 

An additional letter from Miss Leigh to Cap- 
tain De B 's agent will complete the corre- 
spondence. It would appear from Captain De 

B 's previous communication, that it was in 

contemplation to ask the aid of a police magistrate, 
with what distinct object it is now impossible to 
ascertain, though it maj' not unreasonably be sus- 
pected that it had reference to the missing box of 
family papers : — 

"My dear Sir, — I called on Mr. S on 

Friday moming, being anxious that my affairs 
should terminate ; and he begged that I should 
write and ask you to name the time when it would 
be convenient for me to see and confer with you 
as to the steps to be taken, which I would do at 
your office. I am, my dear Sir, 
"Yours very sincerely, 

" Elizabeth Medora Leigh. 
" Thursday, October 13, 1S43. 
" Address Madame Aiibin, IS, Aldenham Terrace, 
" Old St. Pancras Eoad." 

Thus ends the coiTespondence that came into 



the possession of the friends and correspondents 

of Captain De B , in connection with Miss 

Leigh. It does not appear that the threatened 
application to Bow Street was ever made, or that 
any reconciliation between Miss Leigh and Lady 
Byron was ever eff'ected. Upon this subject Mr. 

S , in a letter dated the 24th of September, 

1869, twenty-six years after the time in which 
these events occurred, and forty-five years after 
the death of Lord Byron, writes : "I did not suc- 
ceed in my endeavours, and my failure is some- 
what contradictory of Mrs. Bcecher Stowe's state- 
ment, that Lady Byron never faltered, never gave 
over in motherly tenderness towards the lady 
whom she calls ' the child of sin.' I ascertained 
at the same time (1843), that the so-called ' se- 
cret ' was known to very many persons besides Dr. 
Lushington and Sir George Stephen, and I do not 
know how to reconcile this feet with the ' digni- 
fied and magnanimous silence ' claimed as a merit 
for Lady Byron ; for if she did not impart the 
knowledge, who else can ha-\'e done so ?" 

It is possible, however, although the circum- 
stance may never have come to the knowledge of 

Captain De B or Mr. S , that at some 

after-time, when Miss Leigh passed out of their 
vision, she may have agreed to all the terms de- 
manded of her by Lady Byron, been restored to 
her favour and protection, and ended her days in 
the receipt of her bounty. 

However that may be, Miss Leigh, with her 
sins, her sorrows, and her sufferings, and bearing 
with her her little daughter Marie, disappeared at 
the close of the year 1843, from the great, heart- 
less, busy, cruel world of London, and soon after- 
wards sank into that beneficent grave, where "the 
wicked cease fi'om troubling, and the weary are at 
rest." She sinned much, was much and grievous- 
ly sinred against, and suffered penalties too great 
for her haughty spirit and her weak frame to bear. 
Her mother, her mother's husband. Lady Byron, 
her sister, and her sister's husband, all the persons 
mainly implicated in her story, have all followed 
her to the tomb ; and her narrative, and the story 
told by Lady Byron to Mrs. Stowe, remain the 
only foundations on which Lady Byron's awful 
charge against her husband's memory can rest, as 
far as is now known to the world. We have ah 
ready endeavoured to show that Lady Byron's 
story, as told by Mrs. Stowe, cannot be true, un- 
less Lady Byron herself Mere at one and at the 
same time a paragon of superhuman and of an- 
gelic virtue, and one of the most heartless hypo- 
crites that ever lived. We now proceed to ex- 
amine into the truth of Miss Leigh's allegations, 
to compare the two narratives together, and to 
show that this odious charge against Lord BjTon 
was not concocted until long after his death. 



PAET III. 



RECAPITULATION OF THE NAERATIVES OF MRS. BEECHER STOWE AND 
MEDORA LEIGH, AND VINDICATION OF LORD BYRON. . 



PART III. 



VINDICATION OF LORD BYEON. 



If it be as true in the moral as in the physical 
world that there never can be smoke without fire, 
let us try to discover what is the fire, snd what 
is its extent, which has produced the very black 
smoke that has been poured forth from the fun- 
nel of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's literary engine to 
dai-ken the fome of Lord Byron, as well as of that 
other smoke, which obscures the air, in the mel- 
ancholy story of Medora Leigh. To discover 
liow the fire originated — and whose was the hand 
that first kindled and fed it with fuel — is the sole 
object of this volume. If on impartial examina- 
tion of the two stories, which we shall strive to 
make as fair and unbiassed as the summing-up 
of a judge upon the bench, we seem to bear hard 
upon the reputations of persons hitherto unsus- 
pected, who can make no reply, and who have 
long ago passed to their account, it must be re- 
membered tliat the accusers of Lord Byron are 
the aggressors, and that for any evil consequen- 
ces that may result to individuals in the search 
after "the tiiith, the whole truth, and nothing 
but the truth," those only are to blame who took 
the initiative in calumny, and disinterred, as it 
were, the heart of a great poet for the gratifica- 
tion of a dastardly malice, or a no less dastardly 
curiosity, forty-five years after his errors and 
crimes — if he had committed any — ought to have 
been allowed to rest in the kind oblivion of the 
tomb, or the charitable construction of a world 
that does not possess too much genius to wiiich 
to be ungrateful. Who does not remember the 
inscription upon the tomb of Shakspeare ? — 

" Good fiiend, for Jesus' Bake forbear 
To dig the dust enclosed here ; 
Blest be the man that spares th?8e stones, 
And curst be he that moves my bones 1" 

The awful imprecation startles the attention of 
the most indifferent in the solitude of the church 
of Stratford-upon-Avon, and falls upon the mind 
of the reverential admirer of Shakspeare's genius 
M-ith all the solemnity of a voice from the other 
world. And the words, we think, convey a double 
meaning and admonition, and apply, not only to 
the perishing material part of the dead poet, but 
to the immortal soul; and warn the profane 
against the crime of raking up, from the sanctity 
that ought to enshroud them from the gaze of 
posterity, the secrets of the inner life that the poet 
lived, or the records of the errors into which the 
poet, no less than meaner mortals, may have fall- 
en during his weary pilgnmage through the snares 



and pitfalls of the world. Somebody is greatly 
to be condemned for inventing such a charge as 
that of incest against Lord Byron — if the charge 
be an invention, as we shall endeavour to show. 
Somebody is almost as greatly to be condemned 
for giving unnecessary and malicious currency to 
it, even if it should prove to be well-founded. 

Were the autobiography of Medora Leigh read 
entirely by itself, and without supporting evidence 
of its truth, it would be of little weight or import- 
ance. Though the narrative is plain, simple, and 
truth-like in its minuteness, and tells, at first, very 
terribly against the narrator; yet such a story 
might be a fiction — for fictions quite as life-like 
and as seemingly honest have often been invent- 
ed, either to amuse or to defraud the public. But 
as regards Miss Leigh, the supposition that she 
drew up a wholly fictitious narrative cannot be 
reasonably entertained. She was tridy the fourth 
child of the Hon. Augusta Leigh ; and until she 
had passed her fifteenth year, and become pre- 
cociously a woman, she lived as, and believed her- 
self to be, the daughter of Colonel Leigh, and as 
legitimately the child of both these respectable 
people as the three elder and three younger chil- 
dren of the same marriage. There is, in her 
narrative, no doubt of her maternity ; neither was 
it denied or doubted by Lady Byron, or by Dr. 
Lushington, or Sir George Stephen, acting in 
Lady BjTon's behalf. This fact stands out clear 
and distinct, and must be accepted as positively 
true, whatever opinions may be foi-med of the 
complete or partial truth of the sad story of her 
life, as she relates it. 

Let us glance at the Leigh family as it existed 
in the year 181C, when Lady Byron quitted her 
husband's roof, after trying to discover whether 
he were not insane, and persistently refusing to 
return to him. Colonel Leigh had married his 
cousin, the woman of his choice, and was living 
happily with her — if his happiness can be pre- 
sumed from the number of his young fiimil}', and 
the absence of any whisper of his unhappiness in 
that outer world, which at the time was but too 
apt to pry into the secrets of Lord Byron's house- 
hold, and of those connected with him by birth 
or marriage. Mrs. Leigh had lost her mother in 
her infancy, and her father when she was yet a 
child. As her mother, the Baroness Conyers, 
married her father. Captain Byron, in 1779, and 
died in 1781, the Hon. Augusta Byi'on (after- 
wards Mrs. Leigh), must have been bom in 1780 



42 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



or 1781, and had consequently airived at the age 
of thirty-five or thirty-six at the time when she 
enjoyed the confidence and friendship (real or 
pretended) of Lady Byron, immediately prior to 
and for some weeks subsequent to her departure 
from her husband and her return to her parents. 
Mrs. Leigh's half-brother, Lord Byron, issue of 
his father's second marriage with Miss Gordon, 
was eight years her junior, and she had been ac- 
customed to look upon him with a maternal as 
well as a sisterly aftection— which was very nat- 
ural Avhen it is considered that he was a .school- 
boy when she was a married woman. She took 
a motherly interest in his health, his comfort, his 
character, and his career ; and when time re- 
moved somewhat of the disparity between their 
ages, he returned her affection with an impulsive- 
ness that reflected honour on the innate warmth 
and goodness of his nature. At the time of the 
separation, though a scandalous press — repeating 
the more scandalous innuendoes, hints, whispers, 
or broader accusations of society, that longed to 
humble tlie great Lord Byron because he was 
great — accused him of incest, as well as of mur- 
der, and even hinted that he was not only Childe 
Harold, but Conrad the Corsair, Alp the Rene- 
gade, if not Satan incarnate, the charge of incest 
made no impression on Lord Byron's mind. It 
passed by him as the idle wind, was not accepted 
by Lady Byron — as her letters to Mrs. Leigh, re- 
printed in the "Quarterly Review," sufficiently 
testify — and had, in all probability, never reached 
the privacy of Colonel Leigh's household, or been 
whispered into his ears or those of his wife. 

It has always been a difficulty in the case — sup- 
posing the crime to have been committed — to 
discover how Lady Byron could have been made 
aware of it, either in 181G, if she suspected it then, 
or at the later period, after Lord Byron's death, 
when it is probable that the idea first took firm 
possession of her mind. Did Lord Byron di- 
vulge his guilt ? Did Mrs. Leigh confess it ? 
Did Colonel Leigh discover it? Or did Lady 
Byron make herself acquainted with the flict by 
some means not yet explained to the world ? It 
is not likely that either Lord Byron or Mrs. Leigh 
would be so false to each other as to confess such 
a crime, and it is quite as unlikely, if such a crime 
had been confessed by either, that Colonel Leigh 
would have continued to live quietly and amica- 
bly with his wife until three more children had 
been born to them, and until his death. In re- 
ply to the question, whether Lady Byi-on might 
not have discovered some documentaiy proofs of 
a crime of which foryears afterwards she kept the 
knowledge to herself and Dr. Lushington (if it be 
indeed true that that was the crime she divulged 
to him), there is nothing but the story of the 
breaking open of Lord Byron's writing-desk in 
his absence by Lady Byron, in a fit of jealousy, 
or by her confidante, Mrs. Charlemont, by Lady 
Byron's order or connivance. Lord Byron told 



the stoiy of the desk to Captain Medwin, and 
spoke of it with more mildness than might have 
been expected from a man of his impetuous na- 
ture. " There was," he says — and the conversa- 
tion occurred in 1821, five years after the separa- 
tion — "one act of which I might justly have 
complained, and which was unworthy of any one 
but such a confidante. I allude to the breaking 
open my writing-desk. A book was found in it 
that did not do much credit to ray taste in litera- 
ture, and some letters from a married woman with 
whom I had been intimate before my marriage. 
The use that was made of the latter was most un- 
justifiable, whatever may be thought of the breach 
of confidence that led to their discoveiy. Lady 
Byron sent them to the husband of the lady, who 
had the good sense to take no notice of their con- 
tents. The gravest accusation that has been 
made against me is that of having intrigued with 
Mrs. Mardyn in my awn house — introduced her 
to my own table, &c. There never was a more 
unfounded calumny. Being on the committee of 
Drury Lane Theatre, I have no doubt that sever- 
al actresses called on me ; but as to Mrs. Mardyn, 
who was a beautiful woman, and might have been 
a dangerous visitress, I was scarcely acquainted 
(to speak) with her." 

Though LordBjTon in this passage spoke much 
too lightly of his intrigue.with a married woman 
before his own marriage, it cannot be supposed 
that proof of incest with his sister could have 
been found in, or rather stolen from, his writ- 
ing-desk, when he positively declares, that among 
all the charges brought against him, then and 
subsequently, the gravest was that after his mar- 
riage he had intrigued with a beautiful actress 
whom he only knew by sight, but scarcely knew 
to speak to. If this were the " gravest " charge, 
and one so satisfactorily disproved, there cannot 
have been the graver accusation of incest, unless 
Lord Byron believed — which none but a raging 
lunatic would suppose — that it was a graver of- 
fence to intrigue with an actress than to intrigue 
with his own married sister ! 

From all contemporary accounts, as well as 
from the revelations that have been made since 
the pubhcation of Mrs. Stowe's "True Stoiy," 
Mrs. Leigh, though a very excellent woman, was 
neither a beauty in the eyes of the great world, 
nor a veiy good manager within the little world 
of her own household. Let us take, for instance, 
the description given of her by Mrs. Shelley: — 

" I have seen a gi-eat deal of Mrs. Leigh (Au- 
gusta). . . . Mrs. Leigh was like a mother to 
Byron, being so much older, and not at all an at- 
tractive person. I aftenvards went with her, at 
her request, to pay a wedding-visit to Lady By- 
ron when she returned to town, and she (Mrs. 
Leigh) expressed the greatest anxiety that his 
marriage should reform him. . . . My astonish- 
ment at the present accusation is unbounded : she 



VINDICATION OF LORD BYRON. 



43 



a Dowdy-Goody, I being then, I suppose, a young 
fine lady. Scrope Davies used to come to dinner, 
and talked to me a great deal about Byron after- 
wards, when he resided in the country, and I nev- 
er remember a hint at this unnatural and im- 
. probable liaison when all London was at Byi-on's 
feet. . . . She must have been manied (in 1807) 
when Byron was quite a boy. She had no taste 
for poetiy. She had sad misfortunes in later 
years. Her excellent and only surviving daugh- 
ter nursed her with the tenderest affection in her 
last illness. How any one could have been so 
wicked as to write so horrible a story of one too 
long dead to have friends left who could refute 
the story seems beyond belief." 

The Leigh family were not rich in worldly 
goods — were always in pecuniary dilficulty, from 
which they were not finally or even wiiolly re- 
lieved by the bequest made to them in the will of 
Lord Byron. We hear little of them except from 
Lord Byron, who, speaking of liis sister to Lady 
Blessington at Genoa, the year before his death, 
said of her, and of himself: — 

"My first and earliest impressions were mel- 
ancholy — my poor mother gave them ; hut to my 
sister, who, incajiable of wronrr herself, suspected 
no wrong in others, I owe the little good of which 
I can boast ; and had I earlier known her, it ynight 
have influenced my destiny. Augusta has great 
strength of mind, which is displayed not only in 
her own conduct, but to support the weak and 
infinii of purpose. To me she was, in the hour 
of need, as a tower of strength. Her affection 
ivas my last ralhjing-point, and is now the only 
bright spot that the horizon of England offers to 
my view. Augusta knew all my weaknesses, but 
she had love enough to bear with them. I value 
not the false sentiment of affection that adheres 
to one while we believe hira faultless — not to love 
him would then be diificult : but give me the love 
that, with perception to view the errors, has suf- 
ficient force to pardon them — who can ' love the 
off"ender, yet detest the offence ;' and this my sis- 
ter had. She has given me such good advice, and 
yet, finding me incapable of following it, loved 
and pitied me hut the more because I was erring. 
This is true affection, and, above all, true Chris- 
tian feeling. . . . 

" Lord Byron speaks of his sister, Mrs. Leigh, 
constantly, and always with strong expressions of 
affection. He says she is the most faultless person 
he ever knew, and that she was his only source of 
consolation in his troubles on the separation." 

These confessions to Lady Blessington, coupled, 
as they ought to be, with all that Lord Byron 
wi'ote and said to others who were intimate with 
liim during the closing years of his life, do not 
point to the conclusion that his love for his sister 
was other than as pure and holy as he represent- 



ed it to be in the beautiful poems which his love 
inspired. Nor did he forget his wife, or even 
once admit to any one a knowledge, even the 
slightest, of her cause of quarrel with him. " It 
is CNddent," writes Lady Blessington, "that Lady 
Byron occupies his attention continually. lie in- 
troduces her name frequently ; is fond of recur- 
ring to the brief period of their Uving together ; 
dwells with complacency on her personal attrac- 
tions, saying that, though not regularly handsome, 
he liked her looks. He is very inquisitive about 
her; was much disappointed that I had never 
seen her, nor could give any account of her ap- 
pearance at present. In short, a thousand in- 
describable circumstances have left the impression 
on my mind that she occupies much of his thouglits 
and that they appear to revert continually to her 
and his child. He owned to me, that when he 
reflected on the whole tenor of her conduct — the 
refusing any explanation, never answering his let- 
ters, or holding out even a hope that in future 
years their child might form a bond of union be- 
tween them — he felt exasperated against her, 
and vented this feeling in his ■vvi'itings ; nay, 
more, he blushed for his own weakness in think- 
uig so often and so kindly of one who certainly 
showed no symptom of ever bestowing a thought 
on him." If any moi-e conclusive evidence than 
these conversations afford were wanting to prove 
that Lord Byron knew nothing of this awful 
charge of incest — any more than he did of a 
charge of piracy or murder, it may be found in 
the last letter which Lord Byron ever wrote, only 
a few days before his death, and left unfinished, 
addressed to his sister. The letter shows that 
eight years after the rupture, which would not 
have been final or irreparable except for Lady 
Byron's obduracy. Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigli 
were on terais of friendly intimacy, and that they 
united in sending a joint report to Lord Byron on 
the health of his daughter Ada. It is dated Mis- 
solonghi, February 23rd, 1824 :— 

"My dearest Augusta, — I received a few 
days ago your and Lady Byron's report of Ada's 
health, with other letters from England, for which 
I ought to be, and am (I hope) sufficiently thankfid, 
as they are of great comfort, and I wanted some, 
having been recently unwell, but am now much 
better, so that you must not be alarmed. 

" You will have heard of our journeys, and es- 
capes, and so forth — ]>erhaps \vith some exagger- 
ation ; but it is all veiy well now, and I have been 
some time in Greece, which is in as good a state 
as could be expected, considering circimistances. 
But I will not plague you with politics, wars, or 
earthquakes, though we have had a rather smart 
one three nights ago, M'liich produced a scene ri- 
diculous enough, as no damage was done, except 
to those who stuck fast in the scuffle to get first 
out of the doors or windows ; amongst whom 
some recent importations from England, who had 



44 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



been used to quieter elements, ■were rather squeez- 
ed in the press for precedence. 

' ' I have been obtaining the release of about 
nine-and-twenty Turkish prisoners — men, women, 
and children — and have sent them, at ray o^vn ex- 
]jense, home to their friends ; but one pretty Httle 
girl of nine years of age, named Ilato, or Hatage'e, 
has expressed a strong wish to remain with me, 
or under my care ; and I have nearly determined 
to adopt her, if I thought that Lady Byron would 
let her come to England as a companion to Ada. 
They are about the same age, and we could easily 
provide for her ; if not, I can send her to Italy 
for education. She is very lively and quick, and 
with great black Oriental eyes and Asiatic features. 
All her brothers were killed in the revolution. 
Her mother wishes to return to her husband, who 
is at Trevisa. but says that she would rather en- 
trust the child to me in the present state of the 
countiy. Her extreme youth and sex have hith- 
erto saved her life, but there is no saying what 
might happen in the course of tlie war, and of 
such a war. I shall probably commit her to the 
care of some English lady in the islands for the 
present. The child herself has the same wish, 
and seems to have a decided character for her 
age. 

"You can mention this matter, if you think it 
worth while. I merely wish her to be respecta- 
bly educated and treated ; and if my years and 
all things be considered, I presume it would be 
difficult to conceive me to have any other views. 

"With regard to Ada's health, I am glad to 
hear that she is so much better ; but I think it 
right that Lady Byron should be informed, and 
guard against it accordingly, that her description 
of much of her disposition and tendencies very 
nearly resembles that of my own at a similar age, 
except that I was much more impetuous. Her 
preference of prose (strange as it may seem) was, 
and indeed is, mine ; for I hate reading verse, 
and always did, and I never invented anything 
but boats, ships, and generally something relative 
to the ocean. I showed the report to Colonel 
Stanhope, who was struck with the resemblance 
of parts of it to the paternal line, even now. 

"But it is also fit, though implea^ant, that I 
phould mention, that my recent attack — and a 
veiy severe one — had a strong appearance of 
epilepsy ; why, I know not, for it is [not ?] late 
in life. Its first appearance at thirty-six, and, 
so far as I know, it is not hereditary ; and it is 
that it may not become so, that you should tell 
Lady Byron to take some precautions in the case 
of Ada. 

" My attack has not returned, and I am fight- 
ing it off with abstinence and exercise, and thus 
far with success— if merely casual, it is all very 
well." 

A few days after writing this fragment, full of 
affectionate anxiety for his daughter Ada, Lord 



Byron expired ; and his last coherent words 
were, "My wife — my child — my sister" — placing 
them, no doubt, in that solemn moment when 
the next world was opening before him, in the 
pure, holy, and natural order in which they stood 
in his heart. 

Two years after the premature termination 
of a career glorious in itself, and that might 
have been as happy as it was glorious, had 
it not been for the ill-omened marriage which 
embittered and, to some extent, disgraced it 
— though only in the eyes of the malevolent, 
or the unthinking — we get the next glimpse 
into the family of Lord Byron's sister; and 
leam from Medora Leigh, in her Autobiography, 
that in the year 1826, when she was eleven years 
old, her eldest sister, Georgiana, was married to 
her distant cousin, Mr. Henry Trevanion, of 
Carhays, in Cornwall — a man, like the Leighs, 
not blessed with any superabundance of the gifts 
of fortune. The mariiage was not a happy one. 
Perhaps there had never been much love in the 
case — even if poverty had not come in at the 
door, and forced such love as there was to fly out 
of the window. The characters of these two peo- 
ple, and of the young sister of Mrs. Trevanion, 
deserve especial study. What ■we know of the 
married couple is wholly derived from the evi- 
dence of the sister, who at the time of the 
marriage was a mere child, and who at the 
time of her first initiation into the world's 
wickedness — four j'ears afterwards — was still 
a child in years, though a woman in expe- 
rience of the evil communications that corrupt 
alike the heart, the manners, and the princi- 
ples. Medora Leigh states that her sister's 
marriage met with no approval from any one ex- 
cept her mother, and that incompatibility of tem- 
per, as well as poverty, rendered it unhappy. 
She was thro^vn much into the society of the 
couple — not only while they resided under Colo- 
nel Leigh's roof, but at other places — and appears 
tohavebeen somewhat carelessly left by Mrs. Leigh 
to the guidance of Mr. Trevanion. When this 
child — thus thrust, as it were, into the compan- 
ionship of a man who had married a wife for 
whom he had no great or growing regard — had 
arrived at the age of fifteen, when her mind was 
pliant, when her education was incomplete, when 
her character was unformed, when she particu- 
larly required the guidance, the control, the love, 
and the continuous care of her father and mother, 
and of her mother especially — this Hemy Tre- 
vanion (whose base unmanly conduct language 
fails to find adequate words to condemn) took ad- 
vantage alike of her youth, her passions, and her 
inexperience, and betrayed the confidence of his 
wife, and of his wife's father and mother, and se- 
duced her. Tlie stoiy is told in such explicit 
terms by the victim, and supported by such a 
cloud of evidence, that it is impossible to believe 
it to be a fabrication ; and the consequences of 



VINDICATION OF LORD BYRON. 



the crime which she committed against her sis- 
ter, and the laws of God and man, are so 
artlessly and naturally related — even when 
tliej' bear most hardly upon herself — that the 
credence of no one who reads it impartially, 
and with the desire to form an honest judg- 
ment, can be withheld from it. But while 
the charges which she makes against Henry Tre- 
vanion, and against herself— as being, after the 
first false and fatal step, more or less a willing 
partner of his crime — are to be accepted as com- 
ing from the one best qualified to make and 
to prove them, no such compidsion lies upon 
the reader to accept the truth of the charges 
of connivance at, or encouragement of, her 
offences, which she brings against her moth- 
er and sister. That her mother may have neg- 
lected to watch over her with the anxiety and 
constant care that her age and temperament de- 
manded, and that her sister may never have con- 
ceived the idea of such wickedness as her husband 
perpetrated against a child whom he ought to 
have protected with brotherly if not fatherly care, 
considering his age and hers, are facts which may 
Tje conceded ; but that Mrs. Leigh — a good wom- 
an, by all the aiccounts that have come down to 
us concerning her— should have wilfully encour- 
S aged and laid plans for the seduction of her 
daughter, or that the sister should have entered, 
for any puiiJoses of her own, into a plot so dia- 
bolical, and so seemingly purposeless — is not to 
be believed on the evidence of Medora Leigh, or 
on any other evidence than the confession, which 
was never made, of the luisband and wife them- 
selves. Indeed, Mrs. Lei^h, on Medora Leigh's 
owTi showing, acted a kindly and a motherly part 
towards her after her first great transgression be- 
came known, and did her best, when her erring 
daughter had recovered from tlie illness which 
that transgression had caused, and all traces of 
her guilt seemed to be removed, to draw her 
away from the evil companionship of her sister's 
husband, and bring her out into societj^, whei'e 
she might make pm-er acquaintances. That un- 
der the circumstances she should have been al- 
lowed, either by her mother or her sister, to be- 
come a second time the inmate of Trevanion's 
house, and that she should again be pennitted to 
associate ^nth him on any terms whatever, is, to 
say the least, extraordinary. But, as Colonel 
Leigh had been carefully kept from the knowl- 
edge of liis child's guilt, it is possible that some 
consideration connected with the desirability of 
not exciting his suspicion, led to an arrange- 
ment that, as told by Medora Leigh, appears 
so wholly objectionable. Colonel Leigh's suspi- 
cions, however, appear at last to have been 
aroused; and, to rescue his infatuated daugh- 
ter from the clutches of Mr. Trevanion, his 
only resource — if her statement is to be ac- 
cepted as the absolute trath — was to take her 
forcibly from the company of her sister and 



her sister's husband, and confine her in a private 
lunatic asylum. Until within a short period pre- 
vious to the occurrence of this incident, Medora 
Leigh had always believed Colonel Leigh to be 
her father — felt kindly towards him, as he did to- 
wards her, for she was his favourite child — and 
wished sincerely to spare him any knowledge of her 
shame. But now she was informed, both by her 
sister and her sister's husband, that Colonel Leigh 
was not her father. On what authority, and on 
what knowledge, real or supposed, did Geoi-giana 
Trevanion and her unprincipled husband make 
this charge against Mrs. Leigh ? How could 
Mrs. Trevanion have known tlie fact, if it were 
true ? Did her mother tell her ? Had she heard 
it from her father ? — for she never asserted, it 
would appear, that Colonel Leigh was other than 
her own father, in whatever relation he might 
stand to the unfortunate jMedora. Had she been 
told of it by any one not in the immediate circle 
of her own family ? Had she got it — say, for in- 
stance, — from Lady Byron ? And if so, where 
did Lady Bj'ron get it ? These questions admit 
of no answer to be accepted as a clue out of the 
entanglement, or as a proof — or as even tlie shad- 
ow of a proof — of the guilt of Mrs. Leigh. That 
lady never could have told any of her sons or 
daughters such a story. Colonel Leigh could not 
have heard of, or believed it, or he would not 
have continued to live witli his wife on any terms, 
more especially on terms of domestic aff'ection. 
Lady Byron could not have told the story at that 
time, as will be shown hereafter in the course of 
our dissection of JVIiss Leigh's narrative, and by 
Lady Byron's account of the separation, first pub- 
lished in 1830. Yet the stoiy, as told to Medo- 
ra Leigh by her sister and Sir. Trevanion, mnst 
have originated with some one. That Mrs. Tre- 
vanion should have made such an accusation 
against her mother, proves her to have been at 
all events a heartless woman, and a bad daugh- 
ter — bad to her mother, cruel to her father, as 
well as to aU her brothers and sisters then living 
— even if the charge were tme. That Lady By- 
ron must be absolved from the imputation of hav- 
ing made it, either in 1816 or in 1830, will be ev- 
ident to all who read the account of the separa- 
tion, which Lady Byron caused to be privately 
printed in the latter year and sent to Thomas 
Moore, then engaged on the "Life of Byron," 
who published it in an appendix to his work; — 
unless Lady Byron told the stoiy to Dr. Lush- 
I ington in 181 G, and afterwards confided it tooth- 
' er people, who spread it abroad until it reached 
the ears of Mrs. Trevanion. In this supposition, 
all the praise bestowed upon Lady Byron, for her 
magnanimity in keeping a painful secret, must fall 
' to the ground as baseless and imdeserved ; and 
her memoiy must be charged with a double hy- 
pocrisy, in kee])ing on aff'ectionate terms with 
i Mrs. Leigh, while yet engaged in divulging se- 
I crets to that lady's dishonour. Absolving Lady 



4G 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



Byron at this time, as we must do by the com- 
bined arguments of a whole chain of strong con- 
secutive evidence, we come upon Mrs. Trevanion 
as the original propagator, if not the sole author, 
of the charge which, at the time she made it, seems 
only to have implicated her mother and some per- 
son unknown ; for Lord Byron's name does not 
appear to have been mentioned in the matter to 
Medora Leigh until about nine years afterwards. 
That Mrs. Trevanion, in making this accusation 
against her mother, must have had some strong 
motive is evident. No one would be so wicked 
without some overpowering personal object. The 
object and the motive seem to be not far to seek 
or difficult to find, though the simple-minded Me- 
dora Leigh does not anywhere betray that she had 
any suspicion of them. Mrs. Trevanion wanted 
to get rid of her husband — Mr. Trevanion wanted 
to get rid of his wife ; and Mr. Trevanion, who 
had a certain animal attachment for his wife's sis- 
ter, which he probably, in his own mind, called 
by the desecrated name of love, had made up his 
mind to marry Medora Leigh, if the divorce could 
be obtained. But if Mr. Trevanion could live in 
concubinage with his divorced wife's sister, he 
could not legally many her. Hence, in all prob- 
ability, hes the germ of the whole story. It was 
necessary to make Jledora believe that she was 
not really Georgiana's sister — or, at all events, 
not tl'.e child of Georgiana's father — in order 
that the unfortunate girl, even at the sacrifice of 
her mother's good name, might delude herself 
with the hope that if the divorce were obtained, 
there would remain no real obstacle to her mar- 
riage with her seducer. 

Medora Leigh's elopement from the private lu- 
natic asylum, in which her father and mother had 
placed her to remove her for awhile from the con- 
tamination of Mr. Trevanion's compan}-, was af- 
terwards made one of the pleas on which Mrs. 
Trevanion grounded her suit in the Ecclesiastical 
Court for a divorce from her husband. Medora 
Leigh expressly accuses her sister, but not her 
mother, of having been a party to this elopement 
before it took place, of having been in collusion 
with her husband to bring it about, of having 
surreptitiously conveyed letters to her sewed in 
her linen when it was delivered from the laun- 
dress to the lunatic asylum. These circumstan- 
ces may or may not be true, but tliey are at least 
probable, when it is considei-ed that the suit for 
the divorce was dismissed, for the all-sufficient 
reason that there was guilty collusion between 
the wife and the husband to procure it. 

There is no necessity here for any recapitida- 
tion of the story of Medora Leigh, or of the facts 
connected with her long residence in France with 
Mr. Trevanion, underthenames of Mons. andMa- 
dame Aubin. AVhile there was a possibility that 
the divorce might be obtained, Medora Leigh, 
who had lost all the respect she ever entertained 
for Mr. Trevanion — if she ever could have en- 



tertained any, which is extremely doubtful — 
and had ceased to feel towards him that poor 
amount of misplaced affection which had once 
led lier so A^ofidly astray, continued to cohabit 
with him, and make the best of her painful situa- 
tion. But when the divorce became hopeless, 
and marriage -N^ith her seducer impossible, she 
finally made up her mind to terminate the con- 
nection. The struggle was a long and a severe 
one, but she finally, some years after the birth of 
her daughter Marie, resolved to leave him. And 
she did so. He was utterly unable, from extreme 
poverty, to support her or his child, and in this crisis 
of her Sony fortunes. Miss Leigh appealed to her 
mother for aid. She had been taught that her 
supposed father was not her father, and to him 
she appears to have made no application. Mrs. 
Leigh — who was most probably unaware of the 
cruel accusation that her elder daughter had 
made to her younger one, against herself, Colonel 
Leigh, and some other person unnamed or un- 
known — acted as a forgiving mother should have 
done, wrote to Medora kindly, and promised to 
allow her a small annual income for her subsist- 
ence and that of her child in France. Mrs. 
Leigh, as before remarked, was always in pecuni- 
ary difficulties, and ha^'^ng provided for Medora, 
as she had done for her other children, out of 
the money bequeathed to her by Lord Bja'on, by 
the Deed of Appointment for £3000, payable at 
her and Lady Byron's death, found it hard to 
meet the new claim from Medora which the mis- 
conduct of that young lady had brought upon 
her. She was not regular in the promised pay- 
ments of the poor pittance, which woidd perhaps 
have satisfied Medora, and the feelings of the 
latter towards her mother became embittered. 
For this bitterness, however, her sister Georgi- 
ana was primarily to blame ; for if Medora had 
believed in her mother's innocence, she would, 
doubtless, have felt more sjTnpathy for her moth- 
er's poverty, and accepted with a more grateful 
heart whatever her mother might have been able 
to allow her. 

Amid all her errors and fiiilings, and all 
through the sad story that Medora Leigh tells 
of herself and others, there runs an undercun-ent 
of pride and highmindedness. She had a keen 
sense of wliat was right. And it was her high- 
mindedness that, in her twenty-fifth year, brought 
her into contact with Lady Byron, and opened 
out before her, to all appearance, the prospect of 
a calm if not a happy close to her hitherto turbu- 
lent life, in the afi'ection as well as in the power- 
ful patronage of a noble, wealthy, and tender- 
hearted relative. When she left Mr. Trevanion 
she made up her mind, whatever might happen 
otherwise to hei'self, that the separation should 
be final. She was as decided and as emphatic 
on this point as Lady Byron herself had been 
under very different circumstances. This, how- 
ever, did not suit the passions, or perhaps tiie 



VINDICATION OF LORD BYRON. 



47 



calculations, of Mr. Trevanion ; and it appears 
incidentally from Medora's narrative, that he 
continued to persecute her with his addresses, 
and lu-ge her to return to his protection. Lady 
Byron, who was now to all appearance made 
aware for the first time of Medora Leigh's his- 
tory, was recommended by her friend. Sir Rob- 
ert Wilmot Horton, to remove the persecutor for 
awhile from Medora's path, by consigning Tre- 
vanion to prison for a debt contracted to Lady 
Byron in 182G, for a sum of money the posses- 
sion of which at the time enabled him to marry 
Georgiana Leigh, and without which sum the 
marriage could not have taken place. Medora 
Leigh had been informed by Mr. Trevanion, 
during their coliabitation and intimacy, of all the 
circumstances connected with this loan, and knew 
that all along it had been Trevanion's idea that, 
though called a loan, it was in reality a gift, and 
was never to be repaid. When the project of 
suing Mr. Trevanion for this sum was first 
broached to Medora Leigh, her mind revolted 
against it, as treacherous, dishonourable, and 
unjust. So strongly did she feel upon the 
subject, that she not only wrote to Lady By- 
ron's solicitors to protest against the wrong, as 
she considered it to be, but informed Mr. Tre- 
vanion of what was intended, in order that he 
might place himself beyond the reach of any 
legal proceedings that might be attempted 
for the recovery of the money. The letter 
was forwarded by Lady Byron's solicitors to 
Lady Byron herself, who seems to have been so 
pleased with the spirit displaj^ed in it, and the 
generous feeling of justice and honom' that it ex- 
hibited, even in the case of a man to whom Me- 
dora neither owed gratitude nor consideration, 
tliat she sought and obtained a personal intimacy 
with her unhappy niece. The circumstances are 
told by Miss Leigh with the utmost plainness, 
and with no attempt to create what, m our day, 
would be called a " sensation." It was a beauti- 
fid vision that opened upon the eyes of the child 
of sorrow — upon the poor forlorn destitute crea- 
ture, who had more or less estranged all her nat- 
ural protectors, and who scorned and loathed any 
longer to be indebted for miserable bread to the 
selfish man who had been the means of hurling her 
from her high and innocent estate, and who pre- 
ferred want itself to further relief from his hands. 
Lady Byron took her to her heart, promised to 
bestow motherly care and tenderness, and lifelong 
support and bounty, upon her, on the sole condi- 
tion that her great and true love should be as 
greatly and truly retunied, and that her fullest 
confidence should be as fully reciprocated. Miss 
Leigh was suqjrised at the extent of her good for- 
tune, and, to satisfy her natural wonder at such 
a sudden as well as bright and consolatory change 
in her destiny. Lady Byron explained to her how 
and why it was that she manifested so warm an 
interest in her welfai-e. She learned, from Lady 



Byi-on's own lips, the secret of the alleged pater- 
nity — of which her sister does not seem, from any 
portion of Miss Leigh's narrative, to have inform- 
ed her — and was taught to look upon Lord Byron 
as her father, upon Ada (Lad}' Lovelace) as her 
sister, and upon Lady Byron herself as one who 
was both able and willing to supplj- to her the place 
of the real mother who was in no position to do a 
mother's duty towards her. This was indeed a 
revelation to one in the lowest depths of misery — 
to one who seemed as if she were about to perish, 
alone and unaided, in a world that had no place 
for her. But here again the question recurs, how 
did Lady Byron acquire this knowledge ; when 
did she acquire it ? and who told her of a fact, if 
it were a fact, which was so likely to have been 
known to none but the two people who were co- 
partners in the sin ? If it were Georgiana Tre- 
vanion, as may not unreasonably be supposed, 
who imparted the secret to Lady Byi-on, we are 
no further advanced in elucidation of the mystery, 
and are forced back upon the questions, who told 
Georgiana Trevanion ? how did she become aware 
of her mother's guilt ? or did she invent the story 
for her own purposes ? 

It is clear, from Medora Leigh's narrative, that 
for the first sixteen years of her life she believed 
that Colonel Leigh was as truly her father as he 
was the father of Mrs. Trevanion. It is also pre- 
sumable, if not positively made out, that it was 
not until her twenty-fifth year that Lord Byron's 
paternity of herself was revealed to her by Lord 
Byron's widow — sixteen years after the death of 
Lord Byron, and twenty-four after his separation 
from his wife, under circumstances that set all 
the bitter tongues of that many-headed and scan- 
dalous monster, the public, wagging agamst him 
with a fury never before equalled in England. 
That Lady Byron had not, in the year 1830, be- 
come the confidante of Georgiana Trevanion, and 
was not at that time informed by her that Medora 
Leigh was the daughter of Lord Byron ana Mrs. 
Leigh, that she did not and could not know of 
such an imputation against her husljand, will ap- 
pear from a careful perusal of the little pamphlet 
of fifteen pages which in that year she caused to 
be privately printed, which she forwarded to Mr. 
Thomas Moore, then engaged upon his " Life of 
Byron," and which that gentleman published, in 
extenso, as an appendix to his work. That Lord 
Byron had behaved badly to her she explicitly 
stated ; as also that this bad behaviour, in what- 
ever it consisted, was the reason why she left 
him ; though she admits that when she left she 
would have returned to him, and done her best 
duty as a wife to him, had it been established, on 
satisfactory medical evidence, that insanity might 
be pleaded in extenuation of his oflences towards 
her. Lady Byron said, in that document, "that, 
with the concurrence of his fixmily " (there was 
no one Avho could be designated, at that time, as 
belonging to his family beyond herself and the in- 



48 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



fant Ada, if it were not his sister, Miss Leigh) — 
"she consulted Dr. Baillie, as a friend, on the 
8th of January, 181G " (seven days before she 
quitted him for ever), "respecting this supposed 
malady " (insanity). ' ' When, " adds Lady Byron, 
' ' I arrived at Kirkby Mallory, my parents were 
unacquainted with the existence of any causes 
likely to destroy my prospects of happiness ; and 
when I communicated to them the opinion which 
liad been formed concerning Lord Byron's state 
of mind, they were most anxious to promote his 
restoration by eveiy means in their power. They 
assured tliose relations who •were with him in 
London, that ' they would devote their whole 
care and attention to the alleviation of his mala- 
dy,' and hoped to make the best arrangements 
for his comfort, if he could be induced to visit 
them. With these intentions my mother wrote 
on the 17th tp Lord Byron, inviting him to Kirk- 
by Mallory." 

In other words, whatever Lord Byron's faults 
or crimes were, even if he had committed incest, 
and Ladj^ Byron knew it at the time — as we must 
believe she did, if we are to credit Mrs. Stowe — 
Lord Byron would have been taken to the house 
of Lady Byron's parents, and was actually invited 
there two days after the separation, and would 
have been carefully and affectionately tended by 
the whole fomily until his restoration to health. 

But the charge of insanity not being provable, 
Lady Byron Avould have nothing further to do 
with her husband : — 

' ' The accounts given me after I left Lord By- 
ron by the persons in constant intercourse with 
him, added to those doubts which had before tran- 
siently occurred to my mind, as to the reality of 
the alleged disease ; and the reports of his medi- 
cal attendant were far from establishing the ex- 
istence of anything like lunacy. Under this un- 
certainty, I deemed it right to communicate to 
my narents that, if I were to consider Lord By- 
ron'lrpast conduct as that of a person of sound 
mind, nothing could mduce me to return to him. 
It therefore appeared expedient, both to them and 
myself, to consult the ablest advisers. For that 
object, and also to obtain still further information 
respecting the appearances which seemed to in- 
dicate mental derangement, my mother deter- 
mined to go to London. She was empowered by 
me to take legal opinions on a written statement 
of mine, though I had then reasons for reserving 
a part of the case from the knowledge even of my 
father and mother. 

" Being convinced by the result of these inqui- 
ries, and by the tenor of Lord Byron's proceed- 
ingSj that tlie notion of insanity was an illusion, 
I no longer hesitated to authorise such measures 
as were necessary in order to secure me from ever 
again being placed in his power." 

This nan-ative of Lady Byron, dated and pub- 
lished in 1830, proves that, whatever may have 
been tlie mysterious cause of the separation of 



1816, it could not have been incest with Mrs. 
Leigli ; Jirstli/, because Lady Byron took her 
measures in friendly concert with Mrs. Leigh at 
that time, to ascertain whether or not insanitj' 
could be pleaded in extenuation of her husband's 
errors or crimes against her ; and, secondly, be- 
cause, up to the time of Lord Byron's death, in 
1824, she continued to maintain the same friend- 
ly if not affectionate intimacy with Mrs. Leigh. 
It also helps to prove that in 1830, fourteen years 
after the sepai-ation, this charge had either not 
presented itself to her mind, or she had not 
thought fit to plead it as a justification of her 
conduct lest it should prove damaging to her 
dear friend Mrs. Leigh. 

If ignorant of such a charge against her hus- 
band up to the year 1830, a year before the in- 
formation was given by Georgiana Trevanion to 
her sister Medora, that Colonel Leigh was not 
her father, it is possible that Lady Byron may 
have heard the charge made against ]\Irs. Leigli 
by some one between 1831 and 1840. In the 
latter year she herself made the charge to Me- 
dora, and coupled it with the name of Lord By- 
ron. During this interval of nine years there 
was n© new evidence to be procured. None 
could come from Lord Byron in his grave, none 
could come from the much-maligned Mrs. Leigli ; 
none could come from any one, unless it were 
from Mrs. Trevanion, whose possession of any 
knowledge of it, if it were true, was mysterious, 
if not inexplicable, and whose divulgence and 
propagation of it, if it were false, was mahgnant, 
unfilial, and unnatural. 

We do not wish to do Mrs. Trevanion injus- 
tice ; and though she made to Medora Leigh this 
most cruel accusation against a mother, who al- 
ways seems to have done a mother's duty towards 
all her children, it is just possible that Mrs. Tre- 
vanion was not the actual inventress of the tale, 
and that in the apparently lowest deep of this un- 
happy business there Avas a lower still. Lord Hy- 
ron accused Mrs. Charlemont, the former waiting- 
maid of Lady B^tou's mother, and afterwards 
the governess of Lady Byron in her infancy and 
youth, and her confidante after marriage, of be- 
ing the jjrime som-ce of all the misunderstanding 
and misery which first caused tlie breach between 
the husband and the wife, and as one who after- 
wards persistently, malevolently, and successfidl}' 
widened it. Some fearful wrong, at least in Lord 
Byron's opinion, must have been done by this 
woman, or he could not have -written of her in 
such scathing words as he employed in his world- 
reno-waied " Sketch :" — 

Oh ! wretch — without a tear — ivithoiit a thought, 
Save joy, above the ruin thou liast v/rought — 
Tlie time shall come, nor long remote, when thou 
Sh:ilt feel far more than thou inflictest now ; 
Feel for thy vile self-loving self in vain, 
And turn thee howling in unpitied pain. 
May the strong curse of crush 'd affections light 
Back on thy bosom with reflected blight, 



VINDICATION OF LORD BYRON. 



49 



And make thee ia tliy leprosy of mind 

A3 loathsome to thyself as to mankind ! 

Till all thy self-thoughts curdle into hate, 

Black — as thy will for others would create: 

Till thy hard heart he calcined into dust, 

And thy soul welter in its hideous crust. 

Oh, may thy grave he sleepless as the bed, 

The widow'd couch of fire, that thou hast spread 1 

Then, when thou fain wouldst weary Heaven with prayer, 

Look on thine earthly victims — and despair I 

Lord Byron may have been wrong to write 
thus of a woman ; it may have been midignified 
on his part to publish such bitter vituperation ; 
but no one who imj.artially reads the story of the 
separation, can disbeheve the fact, that Mrs. 
Charlemont had much to do with it ; and that, 
if Lord Byron had been really guilty of the crime 
alleged against him by Mrs. Stowe and Lady 
BjTon, he would not in common prudence have 
run the risk of exasperating against him, by such 
a fierce attack as this, a woman who was in 
Lady Byron's intimate confidence, who knew all 
her secrets, and who could not but have been 
aware of this, had the chai'ge been true in itself, 
or even as much as suspected by Lady Byron at 
the time which Mrs. Stowe indicates. 

Among the many mysteries of a case in which 
so many women, either heartless and unfeeling, 
or vicious and abandoned, were in one way or 
other concerned, the true relation of this particu- 
lar woman to Lady Byron and her husband is not 
among the least perplexing. She who did so 
much mischief prior to the separation, may per- 
haps have been the person who, long after the 
sepai'ation, first put the idea into the head of 
Georgiana Leigh, which the latter afterwai'ds en- 
deavoured to turn to her own accoimt, in her dis- 
pute with her unworthj husband. 

Lady Byron, in the year 1840, and not earlier, 
however, and from whomsoever she may have 
become possessed of the story, believed it to be 
true. There is no positive proof, except in Mrs. 
Stowe's narrative, that she either believed or 
knew of it at any previous time. But hearing 
of it, and believing it, in 1840, she certainly, on 
the testimony of Medora Leigh, in 1843, acted 
towards that misguided and repentant young 
woman in the kindest and most generous man- 
ner, and with a Christian charity as admirable as 
it was unprecedented. But after a short time 
this singular burst of fieiy tenderness cooled down, 
and the dependent lady, whom she called her 
"other child," and treated as if she, indeed, were 
so for the sake of Lord Byron, whose child — 
though the " child of sin " she considered her to 
be — became every day of less importance in her 
sight. In the first wann days of their inter- 
course, she was everything to her ; in the last 
cold days, she was as nothing. Whether from 
faults in Medora's character, or whether Lady 
Bp-on considered her to be insane, as Colonel 
Leigh had done nine years previously, and she 
had once considered her husband to be, she cer- 
tainly made aiTangements for Medora's future 



mode of life which were not likely to be satisfac- 
tory to any high-minded or self-respecting person 
of either sex. She placed Miss Leigh, as it were, 
in the custody of two keepers, a French serving- 
woman and her husband, and paid the money 
she agreed to allow for her subsistence, not to 
her, as she ought to have done if RIedora were fit 
to be entrusted with money, but to them, her 
domestics and underlings, whose society Medora 
did not require, and ought not to have been sub- 
jected to ; and who, if keepers and custodians 
of her person in reality, as Lady BjTon seems to 
have intended, were theoretically her servants. 
And when Medora, after long struggles, and 
many entreaties to Lady Byron to be placed in a 
more satisfactory and honourable position, as the 
adopted child and niece of a lady of rank and 
wealth, took the not very heinous step of travel- 
ling to England without her gracious permission, 
to obtain a personal inter\'iew with her patroness, 
Lady Byron dropped the character alike of 
mother, of aunt, of friend, and of benefactress, 
and left her unlucky ■protegee to perish. 

It is tme that Lady Byron did not positively 
cast Miss Leigh adrift upon the world, but re- 
quired compliance with three conditions which 
she imposed upon her acceptance, through Sir 
George Stephen, her solicitor. But she would 
not see the young lady when she came unbidden 
to London, or even read her letters. The con- 
ditions were : first, an apology for her disobedi- 
ence in daring to come to London without Lady 
Byron's permission, and contraiy to her orders ; 
secondly, her immediate retm-n to the south of 
France — possibly in the company of the valet and 
his wife, though this is not stated ; and thirdly, 
the surrender of the Deed of Appointment to 
tmstees, for the benefit of the little Marie, the 
child of Medora and Trevanion. To the two 
first conditions Miss Leigh consented fully, en- 
tireh% almost abjectly. The third she absolutely 
refused, on the plea that, after what had passed, 
she had no security, if she should give up the 
document, that Lady Byron M'ould permanently 
continue her favour, and the regular payment of 
the annual sum proposed to be allowed to iier. 
She pleaded that if such calamity as the with- 
drawal of Lady Byron's favour should unfortunate- 
ly occur, she would be even without the very 
poor resource — but still a resource, which was 
better than none at all — the chance of disposing 
of her reversionary interest in the sum of £3000, 
to provide for the immediate wants of the evil 
day that would then break over her unsheltered 
head. Lady Byron remained inexorable. Lord 

, Byi-on, in his famous ' ' Farewell, " had accused 
his wife of being " unforgiv-ing." It was the 
most serious cTiarge which he brought against 
her at a time when his heart was full alike of 
love and affliction, and it is impossible, on read- 
ing the latter portion of Medora Leigh's au- 

\ tobiography, not to admit that this defect in 



50 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



Lady Byron's character — of inexorability, of un- 
forgivingness, or of exaction of undue submission 
to her sovereign will and pleasui-e, whatever may 
be the word which best describes her idiosyncrasy 
— rendered it very difficult for those in her in- 
timacy to remain intimate with her, and at the 
same time preserve their self-respect. Thus 
Lord Byron, it will be seen, was not the only 
person who had cause to complain of her in this 
respect, and who was puzzled in his dealings to 
account for the sudden and apparently causeless 
hardenings of her heart towards those for whom 
she had felt or expressed affection. Writing 
upon this subject after Mi'S. Stowe's publication 
had divided the whole English-speaking world 
into two sepai'ate armies, the fi'iends or the foes 
of Lord Byi'on — the friends preponderating as a 
hundred to one — Mr. WiUiam Ilowitt, who 
was admitted into the very variable and un- 
certain atmosphere of Lady Byron's intimacy, 
describes a character in perfect accordance with 
the idea that might be conceived of it from Miss 
Leigh's nan-ative. "I am sure," says Mr. How- 
itt, in a letter to the Daily News, dated the 2nd 
of September, 1869, "that Lady Byron was a 
woman of the most honom-able and conscientious 
intentions, but she was subject to a constitutional 
idiosyncrasy of a most peculiar kiad, which ren- 
dered her, when under its influence, absolutely and 
persistently unjust. I am quite sure from my 
own obsen-ation of her that, when seized by this 
peculiar condition of the nei-ves, she was helpless- 
ly under its control. Through this the changes 
in her mood were sudden, and most painful to aU 
about her. I have seen her of an evening in the 
most amiable, cordial, and sunny humour, full of 
interest and sympathy ; and I have seen her tlie 
next morning come down as if she had lain all 
night not on a feather-bed, but on a glacier — 
frozen as it were to the very soid, and no efforts 
on the part of those around her could restore her 
for the day to a genial social warmth.' In such 
moments she seemed to take sudden and deep 
impressions against persons and things, which, 
though the worst might pass away, left a per- 
manent effect. Let me give an instance or two. 
"Lady Byron was at the period I speak of 
deeply interested in the estabHshment of worldng 
schools for the education of children of the la- 
bouring classes. She induced Lord Lovelace to 
erect one at Ockliam ; she built one on her estate 
at Kirkby MaUorj^, in Leicestershire. On one 
occasion, in one of her most amiable moods, she 
asked me to lunch with her in to^vn, that we 
might discuss her plans for this system of educa- 
tion. She promised to an-ange that we should 
not be interrupted for some hours. I went at the 
time fixed ; but, to my consternation, found her 
in one of her frozen fits. The touch of her hand 
was hke that of death ; in her manner there was 
the silence of the grave. We sat down to lunch- 
eon by ourselves, and I endeavoui'ed to break the 



ice by speaking of incidents of the day. It was 
in vain. The devil of the North Pole was upon 
her, and I could only extract icy monosyllables. 
When we returned to the dra\ving-room, I sought 
to interest her in the topic on which we had met, 
and wliich she had so tnily at heart. It was 
hopeless. She said she felt unable to go into it, 
and I was glad to get away. 

"Again, she was in great difficulty as to the se- 
lection of a master for her working school at liirk- 
by MaUory. It Avas necessary for him to unite 
the veiy rarely united quahties of a thoroughly 
practical knowledge of the operations of agricul- 
ture and gardening with the education and infor- 
mation of an accomplished schoolmaster. She 
asked me to try and discover this rara avis for 
her. I knew exactly such a man in Nottingham- 
shire, who was at the same time thoroughly hon- 
ourable, tiTistworthy, and fond of teaching. At 
her earnest request I prevailed on liim to give up 
his then comfortable position and accept her of- 
fer. For a time he was everything in her eyes 
that a man and a schoolmaster could be. Slie 
was continually speaking of him, when we met, 
in the most cordial tenns. But in the course, as 
I remember, of two or three years, the poor fel- 
low wrote to me in the utmost distress, saying 
that Lady Byron, without the slightest intimation 
of being in any way dissatisfied with him, or with 
his management of the school, had given him no- 
tice to quit. He had entreated her to let him 
know what was the cause of tliis sudden dismiss- 
al. She refused to give any, and he entreated me 
to write to her and endeavour to remove her dis- 
pleasure, or to ascertain its cause. I felt, from 
what I had seen of Lady Byron before, that it 
was useless. I wrote to him, ' Remember Lord 
Byron ! If Lady Byron has taken it into her 
head that you shall go, nothing wiU turn hei*. 
Go you must, and you had better prepare for it.' 
And the poor fellow, mth a family of about five 
children, and his old situation filled up, turned 
out into the world to comparative ruin." 

If Mr. Howitt had known the history of Me- 
dora Leigh, and been as fully acquainted as the 
reader now is vni\\ the manner in ■which she was 
first patronised and then neglected by Lady By- 
ron, he could not have made a more accurate 
sketch of Lady Byron's character — a woman 
whose first impulses appear to have been always 
warm, good, and generous ; whose second im- 
pulses and thoughts were generally cold and un- 
just, who was not to be depended upon for her 
love, but who was stem, unyielding, and unfor- 
giving in her hate, and who, if she had sufficient 
reason for hsr love in any case, does not ever ap- 
pear to have had sufficient reasons for her hatred, 
either of her husband or of anybody else. 

One peculiarity of Lord Byron's character, 
which rendered him agreeable to those who could 
itnderstand him, and which was the occasion of 
much mutual mirth in the social circles which he 



VINDICATION OF LORD BYEON. 



51 



adorned, was his habit of jesting at his own ex- 
pense. He was Avhat the French call a inauvais 
farceur, and made such ponderous jokes that it 
required a. farceur like himself to appreciate them. 
He loved to mystify stupid people, and often did 
so very etfectively, to his own great amusement, 
while the fun lasted, and much to the disgust of 
the victims of his humour, when they discovered 
how their simplicity had been played upon. He 
was also, as the French say, '■'■ le fanfaron des 
vices qu'il n'avait pas," and mth the gravest face 
accused himself of crimes too great to be com- 
mitted, with his tongue in his cheek all the time, 
and laughing, with inner laughter, at the sensa- 
tion which he created, and the maundering good 
faith of the listening believer. Lady Byron seems 
to have been sometimes the victim of these pranks 
of her lord, and in the innocence — worthy of a 
harder name — of her natm-e, accepted as truths 
the monstrous creations of his morbid, though 
sportive, fancy. And she, on her part, resembled, 
while she disresembled, her lord ; for if he was a 
trumpeter of his imaginaiy vices for purposes of 
mystification, she was the fanfaron, or trumpeter 
of virtues on her o^vn part, which were, perhaps, 
equally imaginary. It is always unsafe to jest 
with apathetic, soporific, imsympathetic people, 
male or female, who have no sense of wit, fun, 
or humour, or quick appreciation of the play of 
words, and the flashing phosphorescent lights of 
a double meaning. It is quite evident, from all 
the course of her histoiy, that Lady Byi'on, ex- 
cellent woman as she was, was not one to under- 
stand a jest Mithout explanation, or by any means 
a person to be jested with. 

The literary eA^dence, which evidently weighs 
much in the mind of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, and 
which she has principally gathered from the two 
dramatic poems, "Manfred" and "Cain," may 
possibly, after long and solitary brooding upon 
her woes, have had its influences on Lady Byron's 
mind also, if it did not first of all lead her thoughts 
towards the suspicion that coloured the later years 
of her life. But evidence of this kind is not to 
be accepted as proof against Lord Byron any 
more that passages descriptive of murder in 
Shakespeare's plays could be accepted against 
Shakespeare if any one cliarged him with that 
crime. But if Mrs. Stowe and Lady Byron were 
fair judges of the value of literary evidence, they 
might have gone to poems that were not fictions 
and not intended for fictions, but were the pas- 
sionate expression of fact and reality, and therein, 
if they reverently studied them, they would find 
much to prove that Byron's love for his sister was 
pure and ennobling. Whether in his " Domestic 
Foems," as published and intended for publica- 
tion, or in his private comramiications to his lit- 
kerary and personal friends, which were never in- 
tended for the public eye, he always speaks of 
his sister with the highest respect. To his mind 
she is all goodness, all amiability, all excellence, 
i 



all purity, the incarnation of all the noblest vir- 
tues and most winsome gi-aces of her sex. It is 
impossible not to see that he not only loves but 
honours her, and it is just as impossible for any 
one not led astray by passionate prejudice, like 
Lady Byi'on in her later years, and Mrs. Beecher 
Stowe, who took her words for gospel, not to see 
that no man, however base or hypocritical, coidd 
have truly honoured a woman who had been his 
partner in a sin so hateful. 

RECAPITPLATION. 

Let us endeavour to sum up the history of Lady 
Byron's accusations against Lord Byron in its 
several epochs chronologically. 

In the year 1816 she parted from her husband, 
alleging to her father and mother, and to Dr. 
Lushington and Sir Samuel RomiUy, sixteen rea- 
sons in justification for the step she had taken. 
Neither her father nor her mother, nor Dr. Lush- 
ington nor Sir Samuel Romilly — though they all 
agreed that these charges were very serious — 
thought they were such, indiAddually or collective- 
ly, as might not be condoned. When she dis- 
covered that the doctors did not consider her hus- 
band to be insane, then, and not till then, she 
told Dr. Lushington of a seventeenth cause of 
separation, of which she had made no mention 
to her parents. Upon this seventeenth accusa- 
tion, whatever it was. Dr. Lushington thought 
reconcihation and return to her husband impos- 
sible ; and declared that, if it were attempted, 
he would neither recommend nor have anything 
to do with promoting it. But if this seventeenth 
chai-ge was one of incest with Mrs. Leigh, Lady 
Byron did not break off" her friendly, confidential, 
and affectionate intercourse with that lady, but 
treated her as a sister, and implored her for the 
continuance of her love and goodwill. This is 
extraordinary on the part of Lady Byron, to say 
the least of it. 

In the year 1818, two years after the separa- 
tion, she wrote to her friend. Lady Anne Bar- 
nard, a letter in which she laid the whole blame 
of her separation upon her husband, and would 
take none to herself, stating ' ' that, though he 
woidd not suffer her to remain his wife, he could 
not prevent her from continuing his friend. " She 
represented her aff'ection for Lord Byron as 
"hopeless and unrequited," and asserted that 
"as long as she lived her chief struggle would be 
not to remember him too kindly. It was not for 
her to speak ill of his heart in general ; it was 
sufficient that to her it was hard and impenetrable, 
and that hers must have been broken before his 
coidd be touched." All these tender confessions 
to her friend, Lady Anne, are doubtless the true 
exposition of her feelings in 1818, while Lord 
Byron still lived ; but how are they reconcileable 
with any knowledge of such a crime as incest, 
committed by her husband before and during the 
period of his marriage ? 



MEDORA LEIGH. 



In the year 1824, shortly before her husband's 
death, Lady Byron wrote to Lord Byron, in con- 
junction with Mrs. Leigh, a letter desciiptive of 
the state of health of her daughter Ada ; a fact 
which does not look as if she knew Mrs. Leigh to 
be guilty of the crime imputed to her. And if 
Mrs. Leigh were not guilty. Lord Byron had no 
other sister, and could not be guilty of that pai-- 
ticidar crime, however guilty he might be of 
some other. 

In the year 1830, Lady Byron wrote a history 
of the separation, and sent it to Mr. Thomas 
Moore. We have already quoted enough from 
it to show that in her mind at that time the 
ciiarge against her husband could not have been 
that of incest. 

In the year 18-iO, Lady Byron adopted Eliza- 
beth ]\Iedora Leigh, because she either knew, or 
supposed she knew, the foct at that time, or had 
been told by some one, and believed the story, 
that that young lady was Lord Byron's daughter, 
and that Mrs. Leigh was her mother. 

In the year 1856, Lady Byron told Mrs. Stowe 
that she knew and was convinced of Lord By- 
ron's guilt with his sister prior to the separation 
in 1816, though she told Mrs. Stowe, at the same 
time, that even with this dreadful knowledge in 
her heart, and though Lord Byron had endeav- 
oured not only to corrupt her morals, but to 
shake her religious faith, and make her the cloak, 
and, in a manner, the accomplice of his adulter- 
ous and incestuous intrigue, she loved Lord By- 
ron so well, that she envied the dog that was al- 
lowed to Remain with him, and would have been 
glad, even at the moment she was leaving him for 
ever, " if she could have been allowed to remain 
and watch over him." Truly this is an incom- 
prehensible story, and the greatest of all the By- 
ron mysteries. 

Up to the time of the publication of this charge 
by Mrs. Stowe in 1869, the greatest tenderness had 
been exhibited towards Lady Byron — li-sing and 
after her death — by all writers and commentators 
upon Lord Byron's life and poetry, and by all who 
still mentioned her name in connection with her 
unhappy marriage. Every one respected her char- 
acter and spared her feelings. No one accused 
her of any breach of virtue or propriety. She 
was doubtless considered hard and cold, but 
nothing woi'se was said of her ; and if any par- 
ticular feeling was expressed towards her, it was 
that of sorrow that she and Lord Byron had not 
been able to pass through life amicably and hap- 
pily together. There was, it is true, a vague idea, 
felt rather than expressed, that she was doing 
great injustice to Lord B}Ton's memoiy by her 
mysterious silence — a silence more cruel than any 
direct and plain accusation could have been. 
But when at last this silence was broken, first by 
her confidences to Mrs. Beecher Stowe, and, sec- 
ondly, by the publication of those confidences by 
the latter, no greater charge was even then, and on 



that amount of provocation, brought against her 
than that she was the victim of a strange halluci- 
nation, of which the germ was to be sought in a 
pecidiar jealousy — ^jealousy of Lord Byron while 
he lived, born of the days when he perhaps gave 
her too much cause for such a feeling, and when 
strove with herself, as she told Lady Anne Bar- 
nard, not to remember him too kindly ; and jeal- 
ousy after his death because, among the poems 
that he had bequeathed as an undying legacy to 
the Uterature of his country, there were none by 
any means so beautiful and touching addressed 
to his wife as those which he addressed to his 
sister, with the exception of the pathetic " Fare- 
well," in which he had depicted her as "unfor- 
giving." 

But the forbearance shown towards Lad}'^ By- 
ron by the whole world of English literature, was 
not shown by her towards her husband's memory 
when she made her revelations to Mrs. Stowe, 
and authorised their publication. The provo- 
cation she alleged for taking Mrs. Stowe into her 
confidence was altogether unworthy of a sensible 
woman — namely, the injurious popularity about 
to be given to his poems by means of the cheap 
editions that were thro\vn upon the literary market. 
This plea, if honestly pleaded in justification of 
her conduct, can only be admitted as a proof of 
the jealous monomania which possessed her.* 
Neither was the provocation alleged by Mrs. 
Stowe as a justification for giving Lady Byron's 
confidences to the world, a whit less unworthy — 
for she expressly stated that, had it not been for 
the praises bestowed upon Lord Byron in Madame 
Guiccioli's book, she would have held her peace — 
and that, had the "mistress" (Guiccioli) not 
proved to be the bane, she (Mrs. Stowe) would 
not have thought it incumbent upon her to act 
the part of the antidote. Foolish and undigni- 
fied conduct on the part of both ladies if the 
charge against Lord Byron's memory were true — 
cruel beyond expression if it were false ! 

It has hitherto been taken for granted — by all 
who have written or spoken on the subject — that 
Dr. Lushington, who still lives, could clear up the 
Byi'on mystery if he would. We think that ques- 
tions of professional secrecy, or etiquette, orpimc- 
tilio, ought no longer to prevent him from telling 
what he knows. The admirers of Lord Byi-on's 
genius, all who desire that the great names of 
our literature should be morally pure, need have 
no alarm for any revelations that it may be in the 
power of Dr. Lushington to make. Either Lady 
Byron, in lgl6, confided to him her seventeenth 



* Miss Harriet Martineau, as strong an admirer of Lady 
Byron as Mrs. Beecher Stowe, gives a veiy different ac- 
count of lier ladyship's appreciation of lier husband's ge- 
nius. In an obituary notice of Lady Byron she says : 
" She loved him [Lord Byron] to the last, with a love 
which it was not in his power to destroy. She gloried in 
his. fame: and she would not interfere hctioeen him and 
the public who adored him, any more than she would ad' 
mit the public to judge between him and her." 



VINDICATION OF LORD BYRON. 



53 



charge against her husband — that charge being 
the charge of incest — or she did not. If she did 
not, Dr. Lushington ought, at the all-but-twelfth 
hour of liis long and honourable life, when he has 
still the means of making his voice heard, to de- 
clare the foct, and vindicate, not only the mem- 
ory of Mrs. Leigh and Lord Byron, but that of 
Lady Byron — and rescue her from the charge of 
hypocritically keeping up intimate and affection- 
ate relations with a woman whom she believed 
to be guilty of so foul a crime. If Lady Byron 
did, in truth, make that particular charge against 
her husband, let the foct be stated by Dr. Lush- 
ington — and it -n ill be accepted by the world for 
what it is worth, and for nothing more. It will 
be an ex parte accusation made against a man se- 
ci-etly behind his back ; and, though possibly made 
in good faith, and with a conviction of its truth on 
the part of the accuser, the charge may have had 
no other foundation than the monomaniacal de- 
lusions nmtured in the brain of a proud and a jeal- 
ous woman, married to a husband whom she could 
not whoOy imderstand; and the charge would 
rest wholly upon her evidence. There could be 
no other evidence, unless it coidd be found in the 
written confession of both the incriminated parties, 
which no one supposes or ever has hinted to exist. 
Whether Lady Byron did or did not make the 
charge in 1816, whether Dr. Lushington will or 
will not divulge what he knows relating to that 
3'ear, we are still thrown upon Mrs. Trevanion as 
having made a charge of adultery against her 
mother in 1831 to a sister who, tiU 1831, had no 
suspicion of illegitimate parentage, and upon Lady 
Byron as ha^dng made to Medora Leigh the double 
charge- of incest and adultery against her husband 
in 1840. All these charges rest upon the testi- 
mony of women who could not by any possibility 
adduce any proof of their assertions, and whose 
unsupported evidence would not be accepted as 
conclusive of the guilt of the accused in any 
court of justice in the world. The witnesses are, 
none of them, clean-handed or clean-minded, 



however clear-headed they may have been, least 
of all Mrs. Trevanion ; and certainly not Medora 
Leigh, who accepts the charge without making it, 
and rests her belief entirely upon the information 
of her sister and of Lady Byron. Even Lady 
Byron herself, though perfectly clean-handed, is 
not at all clear-minded ; and has fallen into so 
many contradictions and concealments, and made 
mmgled avowals and disavowals, as to render her 
a very untrustworthy witness. 

If Lord Byron, alive and in the flesh, were on 
trial before any earthly tribunal for the ciime 
charged against him — if Lady Byron was, as she 
is now, the only direct witness against him, and 
Mrs. Trevanion the only dkect witness against 
Mrs. Leigh, and the one or both coidd be sub- 
mitted to examination and to cross-examination 
on the vai'ious remarkable discrepancies of the 
story, as affecting one or the other — would any 
judge sum up the evidence against these persons, 
or any juiy convict either? If they were tried 
in the Court of Honour, there would be no case. 
If they were tried in England, the verdict would 
be. Not Guilty. If they were tried in Scotland, 
the verdict would be, Not Proven. And more 
than this, in the case of Lord Byron, shall he 
not be triumphantly acquitted in the great Court 
of Conscience ? and shall not the voice of Cal- 
iimny against him be hushed for ever ? 

The living prisoner an-aigned for a crime even 
smaller than the one alleged against Lord Byron 
— aye, for the smallest of crimes to which any 
legal penalty is attached — can speak for himself, 
or by the mouth of his counsel, and if there be 
any doubt in his case, is allowed by the merciful 
wisdom of our law to claim and obtain for the 
behoof of his innocence all the benefit of any and 
every sad doubt that may have been excited in 
the minds of those upon Avhom the decision and 
the judgment are thro\\ai. If this be so with the 
living, however obscure and unworthy they may 
be, shall not the illustrious dead, arraigned in 
then- graves, be allowed the same poor p^i^"ilege ? 



PART IV. 



APPENDIX, 



CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON IN GREECE IN 1823. 



PART IV. 

CONVEESATIONS WITH LORD BYEON. 

[Though the following reminiscences of an intercourse of some days with Lord Byron in Greece, in the 
year 1S23, have little or no bearing on the subject discussed in the three preceding parts of this volume— 
except in so far as they confirm all the previous accounts of persons who associated with the poet during the 
period of his self-imposed exile, after his separation from his wife until his death in 1S24, which agreed in 
stating that he always expressed his utter ignorance of and incapacity to understand the charge or charges 
on which Lady Byron justified her flight from his protection— they are, nevertheless, interesting in them- 
selves. The circumstance of an acquaintanceship between Lord Byron and the gentleman who afterwards 
acted on behalf of Medora Leigh, having been formed twenty years previous to his connection with Miss 
Leigh's story, is somewhat remarkable. The narrator made notes of his conversations with Lord Byron, 
began to write them out after his return to England, finally laid the notes aside, and only completed them, 
by request, to form part of this volume.] 



A MAN must he a little weak who thinks he can 
communicate anything new regarding the person- 
al character of Lord Byron, or even add much to 
the store of information upon which the world 
has formed, and posterity will form, its opinion 
of him. Still, one who has had the good fortune 
to have had "conversations" with him, may 
take some credit for self-denial in having kept the 
fact to himself for many years ; while, during al- 
most eveiy month for ten or twelve years after 
his lordship's death, the public was favoured with 
some passages of his everj-day life, from the pens 
of numerous individuals, who had, in greater or 
less degrees of intimacy, associated with him. 
Ha\'ilig passed five days in the great poet's com- 
pany, I beg to offer a condensed report of his con- 
versations during that time, drawn from a memo- 
ry upon which, in this remarkable instance, I can 
rely with as much confidence as upon ^Titten mem- 
oranda. 

It was in the Island of Ithaca, in the month of 
August, 1823, that I was shown into the dining- 
room of the Resident Governor, where Lord By- 
ron, Count Gamba, Dr. Bruno, Mr. Trelawney, 
and Mr. Hamilton Brown, were seated after din- 
ner, with some of the English officers and princi- 
pal inhabitants of the place. I had been inform- 
ed of Lord Byron's presence, but had no means 
of finding him out, except by recollection of his 
portraits ; and I am not ashamed to confess that 
I was puzzled, in my examination of the various 
countenances before me, where to fix upon " the 
man." I at one time almost settled upon Tre- 
lawney, from the interest which he seemed to 
take in the schooner in which I had just arrived ; 
but on ascending to tlie drawing-room, I was 
most agi-eeably undeceived by finding myself 
close to the side of the great object of my curios- 
ity, and engaged in easy conversation with him, 
without presentation or introduction of any kind. 



He was handling and remarking upon the 
books in some small open shelves, and fairly 
spoke to me in such a manner that not to have 
replied would have been boorish. ' ' ' Pope's Ho- 
mer's Odyssey ' — hum ! — that is well placed here, 
undoubtedly; — 'Hume's Essays ' ; — ' Talesof M}- 
Landlord ' ; — there you are, Watty ! Are you re- 
cently from England, sir ?" I answered that I 
had not been there for two years. "Then you 
can bring us no news of the Greek Committee ? 
Here we are all waiting orders, and no orders 
seem likely to come. Ha ! ha I " The conversa- 
tion continued in this desultory flying strain for 
some minutes ; but on a footing of such apparent 
familiarity, that more than one person in the room 
conceived, as I afterwards learnt, that his lordship 
had had some previous knowledge of me. Tliis 
was so completely the opjoosite of what I had al- 
ways heard of his inaccessibility, his hauteur, and 
repulsiveness (particularly towards the ' ' travel- 
ling English "), that I believe my faculties were 
visibly affected by my amazement. By degrees 
I recovered my self-possession, and learnt, from 
his own lips, that he felt considerably annoyed at 
some proceedings of the Greek Committee ; that 
his undertaldng had more the character of a spec- 
ulative adventure, in favour of what he conceived 
to be a glorious principle, than any admiration or 
enthusiasm for the individual cause. 

"I have not changed my opinion of the 
Greeks," he said. "I know them as well as 
most people " (a favourite phrase), " but we must 
not look always too closely at the men who are to 
benefit by our exertions in a good cause, or God 
knows we shall seldom do much good in this 
world. There is Trelawney thinks he has fallen 
in with an angel in Prince Mavrocordato, and lit- 
tle Bruno would -^villingly sacrifice his life for the 
cause^ as he calls it. I must say he has shown 
some sincerity in his devotion, in consenting to 



58 



CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON. 



join it for the little matter he makes of me." I 
ventured to say that, in all probability, the being 
joined with him in any cause was inducement 
enough for any man of moderate pretensions. 
He noticed the compliment only by an indifferent 
smile. "I find but one opinion," he continued, 
" among all people whom I have met since I came 
here — that no good is to be done for these rascal- 
ly Greeks ; that I am sure to be deceived, dis- 
gusted, and all the rest of it. It may be so ; but 
it is chiefly to satisfy myself upon these very points 
that I am going. I go prepared for any thing, 
expecting a deal of roguery and imposition, but 
hoping to do some good." 

"Have you read any ot the late publications 
on Greece ?" I asked. 

"I never read any accounts of a country to 
which I can myself go," said he. *' The Com- 
mittee have sent me some of their ' Crown and 
Anchor ' reports, but I can make nothing of them. " 

I was known to Captain Blaquiere, and I had a 
few days before met him in Corfu, and received 
what was then the latest information on Greek 
affairs. This afforded me some pretence for be- 
ing in the position, which I could not help feel- 
ing was a false one. I was just detailing what I 
knew, when I happily discovered that I was well 
acquainted with one of his lordship's party ; and 
upon recognition he did me the kindness to intro- 
duce mc formally to him, as his very good friend 
and ally. This made not the slightest difference, 
except in relieving me of all awkwardness of feel- 
ing, and the conversation continued in the same 
famUiar flow. To my increased amazement, he 
led it to his works, to Lady Byron, and to his 
daughter. The former was suggested by a vol- 
ume of " Childe Harold "which was on the ta- 
ble ; it was the ugly square Httle German edition, 
and I made free to characterise it as execrable. 
He turned over the leaves, and said; "Yes, it 
was very bad ; but it was better than one he had 
seen in French prose in Switzerland. I know 
not what my friend Mr. Murray will say to it all. 
Kinnaird writes to me that he is wroth about 
many things ; let them do what they like with the 
book — they have been abusive enough of the au- 
thor. ' The Quarterly ' is tiying to make amends, 
however, and 'Blackwood's' people will suffer 
none to attack me but themselves. Milman was, 
I believe, at the bottom of the personahties, be- 
cause — " [here he made a statement regarding 
that gentleman which, as I do not believe, I can- 
not put down]; "but they all sink before an 
American reviewer, who describes me as a kind 
of fiend, and says that the deformities of my mind 
are only to be equalled by those of my body ; it 
is well that any one can see them, at least." Our 
hostess, Mrs. K., advanced to vis about this mo- 
ment, and his lordship continued, smiling: "Does 
not your Gordon blood rise at such abuse of a 
clansman? The gallant Gordons 'bniik nae 
slight.' Are you true to your name, Mrs. K. ?" 



The lady was loud in her reprobation of the atro- 
cious abuse that had recently been heaped upon 
the noble lord, and joined in his assumed clan- 
nish regard for their mutual name. " Lady By- 
ron and you would agree," he said, laughing, 
"though I could not, you are thinking ; you may 
say so, I assure you. I dare say it will turn out 
that I have been tembly in the wrong, hut I al- 
ways want to know what I did." I had not cour- 
age to touch upon this deUcate topic, and Mrs. K. 
seemed to wish it passed over till a less public oc- 
casion. He spoke of ' ' Ada " exactly as any pa- 
rent might have done of a beloved absent child, 
and betrayed not the slightest confusion, or con- 
sciousness of a sore subject, throughout the whole 
conversation, 

I now learnt from him that he had arrived in 
the island from Cephalonia only that morning, 
and that it was his purpose (as it was mine) to 
visit its antiquities and localities. A ride to the 
Fountain of Arethusa had been planned for the 
next day, and I had the happiness of being in- 
vited to join it. Pope's " Homer " was taken up 
for a description of the place, and it led to the fol- 
lowang remarks: — "Yes, the very best transla- 
tion that ever was, or ever will be ; there is noth- 
ing like it in the world, be assured. It is quite 
delightful to find Pope's character coming round 
again ; I forgive Gifford everything for that. Pu- 
ritan as he is, he has too much good sense not to 
know that, even if all the lies about Pope were 
truths, his character is one of the best among lit- 
erary men. There is nobody now like him, ex- 
cept Watty, and he is as nearly faultless as ever 
human being was." 

After what has already been repeatedly pub- 
lished of Lord Byron's opinion of Sir Walter Scott 
and the " Waverley Novels " it would be a waste 
of time to specify what was said by him on these 
subjects to the present writer. The greater part 
of it, and nearly in the same words, appeared in 
Captain Medwin's, Lady Blessington's and oth- 
er journals, which need no support or confirma- 
tion from any one. I therefore omit what pass- 
ed between us on these topics, as already pub- 
Ushed, and well known through other channels. 
One statement I do not recollect to have seen 
noted, and that was his intention, expressed and 
implied, more than once, of paying a visit to Sir 
Walter in the then ensuing spring. 

The remainder of the evening was passed in ar- 
ranging the plan of proceeding on the morrow's 
excursion, in the com-se of which his lordship oc- 
casionally interjected a facetious remark of some 
general nature ; but in such fascinating tones, 
and with such a degree ot amiability and famil- 
iarity, that, of all the Ubels of which I well knew 
the public press to be guilty, that of describing 
Lord Byron as inaccessible, morose, and repul- 
sive in manner and language, seemed to me the 
most false and atrocious. I found I was to be 
accommodated for the night under the same roof 



CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON. 



59 



\nth his lordship, and I retired, satisfied, in my 
o^vn mind, that favouring chance had that day 
made me the intimate (almost confidential) friend 
of the greatest literaiy man of modem times. 

The next morning, about 9 o'clock, the party 
for the Fountain of Arethusa assembled in the par- 
lour of Captain K. ; but Lord Byron was miss- 
ing. Trelawney, who had slept in the room ad- 
joining his lordship's, told us that he feared he 
had been ill dimng the night, but that he had 
gone out in a boat veiy early in the morning. 
At this moment I happened to be standing at the 
window, and saw the object of our anxiety in the 
act of landing on the beach, about ten or a dozen 
yards from the house, to which he walked slowly 
up. I never saw and could not conceive the 
possibihty of such a change in the appearance of 
a human being as had taken place since the pre- 
vious night. He looked like a man imder sen- 
tence of death, or returning from the funeral of 
all that he held dear on earth. His person seem- 
ed shrunk, his face was pale, and his eyes languid 
and fixed on the ground. He was leaning upon 
a stick, and had changed his dark camlet-caped 
surtout of the preceding evening for a nankeen 
jacket, embroidered hke a hussar's — an attempt 
at dandjdsm, or dash, to which the look and de- 
meanour of the wearer formed a sad contrast. 
On entering the room, his lordship made the usual 
salutations ; and, after some preliminaiy arrange- 
ments, the party moved off on horses and mules 
to the place of destmation for the day. 

I was so struck ^vith the difference of appear- 
ance in Lord Byron, that the determination to 
which I had come, to try to monopolise him, if 
possible, to myself, without regard to appearances 
or biens^ance, almost entkely gave way mider the 
terror of a freezing repidse. I advanced to him 
Under the influence of this feeling, but I had 
scarcely received his answer, when all uneasiness 
about my reception vanished, and I stuck as close 
to him as the road pennitted our animals to go. 
His voice sounded timidly and quiveiingly at 
first ; but as the conversation proceeded, it became 
steady and firm. The beautifid country in which 
we were traveUing naturally fonned .a prominent 
topic, as well as the character of the people and 
of the Government. Of the latter I found him 
(to my amazement) an admirei". "There is a 
deal of fine stuff about that old Maitland," he 
said ; " he knows the Greeks well. Do you know 
if it be true that he ordered one of their brigs to 
be blown out of the water if she stayed ten min- 
utes longer in Corfu Roads?" I happened to 
know, and told liim that it was true. "Well, of 
all follies, that of daring to say what one cannot 
dare to do is the least to be pitied. Do you think 
Sir Tom would have really executed his threat ?" 
I told his lordship that I believed he certainly 
would, and that this knowledge of his being in 
earnest in eveiything he said was the cause not 
only of the quiet termination of that affair, but 



of the order and subordination of the whole of 
the countries under his government. 

The conversation again insensibly reverted to 
Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron repeated to me 
the anecdote of the interview in Murray's shop, 
as conclusive evidence of his being the author of 
the "Waverley Novels." He was a httle but 
not durably staggered by the equally well-known 
anecdote of Sir Walter having, with some solem- 
nity, denied the authorship to Mr. Wilson Cro- 
ker, in the presence of George IV., the Duke of 
York, and the late Lord Canterbuiy. He agreed 
that an author wishing to conceal his authorship 
had a right to give any answer whatever that suc- 
ceeded in convincing an inquii'er that he* was 
wrong in his suppositions. 

When we came within sight of the object of 
our excursion, there happened to be an old shep- 
herd in the act of coming do\vn from the fountain. 
His lordship at once fixed upon him for Eumseus, 
and invited him back with us to " fill up the pic- 
ture." Having di'unk of the fountain, and eaten 
of our less classical repast of cold fowls, &c., his 
lordship again became Uvely and full of pleasant 
conceits. To detail the conversation (which was 
general, and varied as the individuals that par- 
took of it) is now impossible, and certainly not 
desirable if it were possible. I wish to observe, 
however, that on tliis and one very similar oc- 
casion, it was veiy unlike the kind of conver- 
sation which Lord Byron is described as hold- 
ing with various individuals who have -WTitten 
about him. StiU more unhke was it to what one 
woixld have supposed his conversation to be ; it 
was exactly that of nine-tenths of the cultivated 
class of EngUsh gentlemen, careless and uncon- 
scious of eveiything but the present moment. 
Lord Byron ceased to be more than one of the 
party, and stood some sharp jokes, practical and 
verbal, with more good-nature than would have 
done many of the ciphers whom one is doomed 
to tolerate in society. 

We retunied as we went, but no opportunity 
presented itself of introducing any subject of 
interest beyond that of the place and time. His 
lordship seemed quite restored by the excursion, 
and in the evening came to the Resident's, bear- 
ing himself towards eveiybody in the same easy, 
gentlemanly way that rendered him the deUght 
and ornament of every society in which he chose 
to unbend himself. 

The Resident was as absolute a monarch as 
Ulysses, and I dare say much more hospitable 
and obliging. He found quarters for the whole 
Anglo -Italian party, in the best houses of the 
town, and received them on the followuig morn- 
ing at the most luxurious of breakfasts, consist- 
ing, among other native productions, of fresh- 
gathered grapes, just ripened, but which were 
pronounced of some danger to be eaten, as not 
having had the " first rain." This is worthy of 



60 



CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON. 



note, as having been apparently a gi'ound of 
their being taken by Lord Byron in preference 
to the riper and safer figs and nectarines ; but 
he deemed it a fair reason for an apology to the 
M'orthy doctor of the 8th Regiment (Dr. Scott), 
who had cautioned the company against the 
fruit. 

"I take them, doctor," said his lordship, "as 
I take other prohibited things — in order to ac- 
custom myself to any and all things that a man 
may be compelled to take where I am going — 
in the same way that I abstain from all super- 
fluities, even salt to my eggs, or butter to my 
bread ; and I take tea, Mrs. I&iox, without su- 
gar or cream. But tea itself is, really, the most 
superfluous of superfluities, though I am never 
without it." 

I heard these observations as they were made 
to Dr. Scott, next to whom I was sitting, towards 
the end of the table ; but I could not hear the 
animated conversation that was going on between 
his lordship and Mrs. Knox, beyond the occa- 
sional mention of "Penelope," and, when one of 
her children came in to her, "Telemachus," — 
names too obviously apropos of the place and 
persons to be omitted in any incidental conver- 
sation in Ithaca. 

The excursion to the "School of Homer" 
(why so called nobody seemed to know) was to 
be made by water ; and the party of the preced- 
ing day, except the lady, embarked in an elegant 
country boat with four rowers, and sundry pack- 
ages and jars of eatables and drinkables. As 
soon as we were seated under the awning — Lord 
Byron in the centre seat, with his face to the 
stem — Trelawney took charge of the tiller. The 
other passengers being seated on the sides, the 
usual small flying general conversation began. 
Lord Byron seemed in a mood calculated to 
make the company think he meant something 
more fonnal than ordinary talk. Of course there 
could not be anything said in the nature of a dia- 
logue, which, to be honest, was the kind of con- 
versation that I had at heart. He began by in- 
foraiing us that he had just been reading, with 
renewed pleasure, David Hume's Essays. He 
considered Hume to be by far the most profound 
thinker and clearest reasoner of the many philos- 
ophers and metaphysicians of the last centmy. 
"There is," said he, "no refuting him, and for 
simplicity and clearness of style he is unmatched, 
and is utterly unanswerable." He referred par- 
ticularly to the Essay on Miracles. It was re- 
marked to him, that it had nevertheless been spe- 
cifically answered, and, some people thought, re- 
futed, by a Presbyterian divine, Dr. Campbell of 
Aberdeen. I could not hear whether his lord- 
ship knew of the author, but the remark did not 
afiect his opinion ; it merely turned the conversa- 
tion to Aberdeen- and "poor John Scott," the 
most promising and most unfortunate Uterary 
man of the day, whom he knew well, and who, 



said he, knew him (Lord Byron) as a schoolboy. 
Scotland, Walter Scott (or, as his lordship always 
called him), "Watty," the " Waverley Novels," 
the "Rejected Addresses," and the English aris- 
tocracy (which he reviled most bitterly), were 
the prominent objects of nearly an hour's con- 
versation. It was varied, towards the end of the 
voyage, in this original fashion: "But come, 
gentlemen, we must have some inspiration. 
Here Tita, I'Hippocrena ' " 

This brought from the bows of the boat a huge 
Venetian gondolier, with a musket slung diag- 
onally across his back, a stone jar of two gallons 
of what turned out to be English gin, another 
porous one of water, and a quart pitcher, into 
which the gondolier poured the spirit, and laid 
the whole, with two or three large tumblers, at 
the feet of his expectant lord, who quickly un- 
corked the jar, and began to pour its contents into 
the smaller vessel. 

" Now, gentlemen, drink deep, or taste not the 
Pierian spring ; it is the true poetic source. I'm 
a rogue if I have drunk to-day. Come " (hand- 
ing tumblers round to us), " this is the way ;" and 
he nearly half-filled a tumbler, and then poured 
from the height of his arm out of the water-jar, 
till the timibler sparkled in the sun like soda-wa- 
ter, and drunk it off while eff'ei'vescing, glorious 
ginswizzle, a most tempting beverage, of which 
every one on board took his share, munching after 
it a biscuit out of a huge tin-case of them. This 
certainly exhilarated us till we landed within some 
fifty or sixty yards of the house to which we were 
directed. 

On our way we learned that the Regent of the 
island — that is, the native governor, as Captain 
Knox was the protecting Power's Governor 
(viceroy over the king!) — had forwarded the 
materials of a substantial feast to the occupant 
(his brother) ; for the "nobih luglesi," who were 
to honour his premises. In mentioning this act 
of the Regent to Lord Byron, his remark was a 
repetition of the satirical line in the imitation ad- 
dress of the poet Fitzgerald, " God bless the Re- 
gent ! " and as I mentioned the relationship to our 
appi-oaching host, he added, with a laugh, "and 
the Duke of York!" 

On entering the mansion, we were received 
by the whole family, commencing with the moth- 
er of the princes — a venerable lady of at least 
seventy, dressed in pure Greek costume, to whom 
Lord Byron went up, with some formaUty, and, 
with a shght bend of the knee, took her hand, 
and kissed it reverently. We then moved into 
the adjoining " sala," or saloon, where there was 
a profusion of English comestibles, in the shape 
of cold sirloin of beef, fowls, ham, &c., to which 
we did such honour as a sea-appetite generally 
produces. It was rather distressing that not one 
of the entertainers touched any of these luxuries, 
it being the Greek Second or Panagia Lent, but 
fed entu-ely on some cold fish fried in oil, and 



CONVERSATIONS WITH LOED BYEON. 



Gl 



green saLid, of which last Lord Byron, in adhe- 
rence to liis rule of accustoming himself to eat 
anything eatable, partook, though with an oh- 
Tious elfort — as well as of the various wines that 
were on the table, particularly Ithaca, which is 
exactly port as made and drunk in the country 
of its growth. 

I was not antiquary enough to know to what 
object of antiquity oiu* visit was made, but I saw 
Lord Byron in earnest conversation with a very 
antique old Greek monk in full clerical habit. 
He was a bishop, sitting on a stone of the ruined 
Avail close bj^, and he turned out to be the " Es- 
prit fort " mentioned in a note at the end of the 
second canto of " Childe Harold " — a freethinker, 
at least a freespeaker, when he called the sacri- 
fice of the Mass " una Coglioneria." 

When we embarked, on our return to Vathi, 
Lord Byron seemed moody and sullen, but 
brightened up as he saw a ripple on tlie water, a 
mast and sail raised in the cutter, and Trelaw- 
ney seated in the stern with the tiller in hand. 
In a few minutes we Avere scudding, gunwale un- 
der, in a position infinitely more beautiful than 
agreeable to landsmen, and Lord Byron obviously 
enjoying the not improbable idea of a swim for 
life. His motions as he sat tended to increase 
the impulse of the breeze, and tended also to sway 
the boat to leeward. " I don't know," he said, 
" if you all swim, gentlemen ; but if you do, 
you will have fifty fathoms of blue water to sup- 
port you ; and if you do not, you will have it 
over you. But as you may not all be prepared, 
starboard, Trelawney — bring her up. There! 
she is trim ; and now let us have a glass of grog 
after the gale. Tita, i Jiaschi !" This was fol- 
lowed by a reproduction of the gin-and-water jars, 
and a round of the immortal swizzle. To my 
very great sui-jDrise, it was new to the company 
that the liquor which they were now enjoying was 
the product of Scotland, in the shape of what is 
called "low-wines," or semi-distilled whisky — 
chiefly from the distilleiy of mine ancient friend, 
James Haig, of Lochrin ; but the communica- 
tion seemed to gratify the noble drinker, and led 
to the recitation by one of the company, in pure 
lowland Scotch, of Bums's Petition to the House 
of Commons in behalf of the national liquor. 
The last stanza, beginning, 

"Scotland, my auld respeckit mither," 

very much pleased Lord Byi'on, who said that he 
too was more than half a Scotchman. 

The conversation again turned on the "Wa- 
verley Novels," and on this occasion Lord ByTon 
spoke of " The Bride of Lammermuir," and cited 
the passage where the mother of the cooper's 
wife tells her husband (the cooper) that she 
"kent naething aboot what he might do to his 
wife ; but the deil a finger shall ye lay on my 
dochter, and that ye may foond upon." Shortly 
afterwards, the conversation having turned upon 
poetry, his lordship mentioned the famous ode 



on the death of Sir John Moore as the finest 
piece of poetry in any language. He recited 
some lines of it. One of the company, vfith 
more presumption than wisdom, took him up, as 
his memory seemed to lag, by filling in the line : 

" And he looked like a warrior taking his rest, 
With his martial cloak around him." 

Lord Byron, with a look at the interloper that 
spoke as if death were in it, and no death was 
sufficiently cruel for him, shouted, " 'He lay' — 
'he lay like a warrior,' not 'he looked.' " The 
pretender was struck dumb, but, with reference to 
his lordship's laudation of the piece, he ventm-ed 
half to whisper that the ' ' Gladiator " was superior 
to it, as it is to any poetical picture ever painted 
in words. The reply was a benign look, and a 
flattering recognition, by a little applausive tap- 
ping of his tobacco-box on the board on which 
he sat. 

On arriving at Vathi, we repaired to our sev- 
eral rooms in the worthy citizens' houses where 
we were billeted, to read and meditate, and write 
and converse, as we might meet, indoors or out ; 
and much profound lucubration took place among 
us, on the characteristics and disposition of the 
veiy eminent personage with whom we were for 
the time associated. Dr. Scott, the assistant- 
surgeon of the 8th Foot, who had heard of, 
though he may not have witnessed, any of the 
peculiarities of the great poet, accounted for 
them, and even for the sublimities of his poetry, 
by an abnormal construction or chronic derange- 
ment of the digestive organs — a theoiy which 
experience and observation of other people than 
poets afford many reasons to support : 

''Is it not strange now — ten times strange — to tliink. 
And is it not enough one's faith to shatter, 

That right or wrong direction of a drink, 
A plus or minus of a yellow matter. 

One half the world should elevate or sink 
To bliss or woe (most commonly the latter) — 

That human happiness is well-formed chyle, 

And human miseiy redundant bile!" 

The next morning the accounts we heard of 
Lord Byron were contradictory : Trelawney, who 
slept in the next room to him, stating that he had 
been writing the greater part of the night, and 
he alleged it was the sixteenth canto of "Don 
Juan;" and Dr. Bruno, who visited him at in-, 
tervals, and was many hours in personal attend- 
ance at his bedside, asserting that he had been 
seriously ill, and had been saved only by those 
" benedette pillule" (blessed pills), which so oft- 
en had had that effect. His lordship again ap- 
peared rowing in from his bath at the Lazzaretto, 
a course of proceeding (bathing and boating) 
which caused Dr. Bruno to wring his hands and 
tear his hair with alarm and vexation. 

It was however the day fixed for our return to 
Cephalonia, and, having gladly assented to the 
proposition to join the suite, we all moimted po- 
nies to cross the island to a small harbour on the 
south side, where a boat was waiting to bear us 



62 



CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON. 



to Santa Eufemia, a custom-house station on the 
coast of Cephalonia, about half an hour's passage 
from Ithaca, which we accordingly passed, and 
arrived at the collector's mansion about 2 o'clock. 
During the journey across the smaller island, I 
made a bold push, and succeeded in securing, with 
my small pony, the side-berth of Lord Byron's 
large brown steed, and held by him in the nan'ow 
path, to the exclusion of companions better enti- 
tled to the post. His conversation was not mere- 
ly free — it was famiUar and intimate, as if we 
were schoolboys meeting after a long separation. 
I happened to be " up " in the " Waverley Nov- 
els," had seen several letters of Sir Walter Scott's 
about his pedigree for his baronetage, could re- 
peat almost every one of the ' ' Rejected Address- 
es," and knew something of the "London Mag- 
azine " contributors, who were then in the zenith 
of their reputation — Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Tal- 
fourd. Browning, Allan Cunningham, Reynolds, 
Darley, &c. But his Lordship pointed at the 
higher game of Southey, Gilford (whom he all 
but worshipped), Jeffrey of the ' ' Edinburgh Re- 
view," John Wilson, and other Blackwoodites. 
He said they were all infidels, as every man had 
a right to be ; that Edinburgh was imderstood to 
be the seat of all infideUty, and he mentioned 
names (Dr. Chalmers and Andrew Thomson, for 
examples) among the clergy as being of the cat- 
egory. This I never could admit. He was par- 
ticularly bitter against Southey, sneered at Words- 
worth, admired Thomas Campbell, classing his 
' ' Battle of the Baltic " with the very highest of 
lyric productions. "Nothing finer," he said 
" was ever written than : 

" There was silence deep as death, 
And the boldest held his breath 
For a time." 

We arrived at one of the beautiful bays that 
encircle the island, hke a wavy wreath of silver 
sand studded with gold and emerald in a field of 
liquid pearl, and embarked in the collector's boat 
for the opposite shore of St. Eufemia, where, on 
arrival, we were received by its courteous chief, 
Mr. Toole, in a sort of state — with his whole es- 
tablishment, French and English, uncovered and 
bowing. He had had notice of the illustrious 
poet's expected arrival, and had prepared one of 
the usual luxurious feasts in his honour — feasts 
which Lord Byron said " played the devil" with 
him, for he could not abstain when good eating 
was vrithin his reach. The apartment assigned 
to us was smaU, and the table could not accom- 
modate the whole party. There were, according- 
ly, small side or " children's tables," for such 
guests as might choose to be willing to take seats 
at them. "Ha!" said Lord Byi-on, "England 
all over — places for Tommy and Billy, and Liz- 
zie and Molly, if there were any. Mr. " (ad- 
dressing me), " will you be my Tommy ?" — point- 
ing to the two vacant seats at a small side-table, 
close to the chair of our host, Down I sat, de- 



lighted, opposite to my companion, and had a 
tete-a-tete dinner apart from the head-table, from 
which, as usual, we were profusely helped to 
the most recherche portions. " Verily," said his 
lordship, "I cannot abstain." His conversa- 
tion, however, was directed chiefly to his host, 
from whom he received much local information, 
and had his admiration of Sir Thomas Maitland 
increased by some particulars of his system of 
government. There were no vacant apartments 
within the station, but we learned that quarters 
had been provided for us at a monasteiy on the 
hill of Samos, across the bay. Thither we were 
all transported at twilight, and ascended to the 
large venerable abode of some dozen of ft-iars, who 
were prepared for om- arrival and accommodation. 
Outside the walls of the building there were some 
open sarcophagi and some pieces of carved frieze 
and fragments of pottery. 

I walked with his lordship and Count Gamba 
to examine them, speculating philosophically on 
their quondam contents. Something to our sur- 
prise, Lord Byron clambered over into the deep- 
est, and lay in the bottom at full length on his 
back, muttering some English lines. I may have 
been wi'ong, or idly and unjustifiably curious, but 
I leaned over to hear what the lines might be. 
I found they were unconnected fragments of the 
scene in "Hamlet," where he moraUses with 
Horatio on the skull : 

"Imperial Cfesar, dead and turned to clay, 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away ; 
Oh that that eartli that held the world in awe 
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw." 

As he spi-ang out and rejoined us, he said, 
" Hamlet, as a whole, is original ; but I do not 
admire him to the extent of the common opinion. 
More than all, he requires the very best acting. 
Kean did not understand the part, and one could 
not look at him after having seen John Kemble, 
whose squeaking voice was lost in his noble car- 
riage and thorough right conception of the char- 
acter. Rogers told me that Kemble used to be 
almost always hissed in the beginning of his ca- 
reer. The best actor on the stage, he said, is 
Charles Young. His Pierre was never equalled, 
and never will be." Amid such flying desultory 
conversation we entered the monastery, and took 
coffee for lack of anything else, while our sei-v- 
ants were preparing our beds. Lord Byron re- 
tired almost immediately from the sala. Shortly 
afterwards we were astonished and alarmed by 
the entry of Dr. Bruno, ^vi-inging his hands and 
tearing his hair — a practice much too frequent 
with him — and ejaculating: " OA, Maria, san- 
tissima Maria, se non e gia morto — cielo, perche 
non son morto io. " It appeai'ed that Lord Byron 
was seized with violent spasms in the stomach and 
liver, and his brain was excited to dangerous ex- 
cess, so that he would not tolerate the presence 
of any person in his room. He refused all med- 
icine, and stamped and tore all his clothes and 
bedding like a manaic. We could hear him 



CONVERSATIONS WITH LORD BYRON. 



63 



rattling and ejaculating. Poor Dr. Bruno stood 
lamenting in agony of mind, in anticipation of the 
most dire results if immediate relief was not ob- 
tained by powerful cathartics, but Lord Byron 
had expelled him from the room by main force. 
He now implored one or more of the company to 
go to liis lordship and induce him, if possible, to 
save his hfe by taking the necessaiy medicine. 
Trela-iviiey at once proceeded to the room, but 
soon returned, saying that it would require ten 
such as he to hold his lordship for a minute, add- 
ing that Lord Byron woidd not leave an unbrok- 
en article in the room. The doctor again assay- 
ed an entrance, but without success. The monks 
were becoming alanned, and so, in truth, were all 
present. The doctor asked me to tiy to bring his 
lordship to reason ; "he will thank you when he 
is well," he said, " but get him to take this one 
pill, and he will be safe." It seemed a very easy 
imdertaking, and I went. There being no lock 
on the door, entry was obtained in spite of a bar- 
ricade of chairs and a table within. His lordship 
was half-undressed, standing in a far corner like 
a hunted animal at bay. As I looked deter- 
mined to advance in spite of his imprecations of 
"Baih! out, out of my sight ! fiends, can I have 
no peace, no relief from this hell ! Leave me, I 
say!" and he simply lifted the chair nearest to 
him, and hurled it direct at my head ; I escaped 
as I best could, and returned to the sala. The 
matter was obviously serious, and we all counsel- 
led force and such coercive measures as might be 
necessaiy to make him swallow the curative med- 
icine. Mr. Hamilton Browne, one of our party, 
now volunteered an attempt, and the silence that 
succeeded his entrance augiured weU for his suc- 
cess. He retm-ned much sooner than expected, 
telling the doctor that he might go to sleep ; Lord 
Byi-on had taken both the pills, and had lain down 
on my mattress and bedding, prepared for him by 
my seiTant, the only regular bed in the company, 
the others being trimks and portable tressels, 
with such softening as might be procured for the 
occasion. Lord Byron's beautiful and most com- 
modious patent portmanteau bed, with every ap- 
phance that profusion of money could provide, 
was mine for the night. 

On the following morning Lord Byron was all 
dejection and penitence, not expressed in words, 
but amply in looks and movements, till something 
tending to the jocidar occurred to enliven him 
and us. Wandering from room to room, from 
porch to balcony, it so happened that Lord BjTon 
stimibled upon their occupants in the act of wi'it- 
ing accounts, journals, private letters, or memo- 
randa. He thus came upon me on an outer 
roof of a part of the building while Avi-iting, as 
as far as I recollect, these very notes of liis con- 
versation and conduct. What occurred, how- 
ever, was not of much consequence — or none — 
and turned upon the fact that so many people 



were ^vriting, when he, the great voluminous 
writer, so supposed, was not writing at aU. 

The journey of the day was to be over the 
Black Mountain to Ai'gostoh, the capital of Ceph- 
alonia. We set out about noon, struggling as 
we best could over moor, marsh ground, and 
watery wastes. Lord Byron revived ; and, live- 
ly on horseback, sang, at the pitch of his voice, 
many of Moore's melodies and stray snatches of 
popular songs of the time in the common style 
of the streets. There was nothing remarkable 
in the conversation. On arrival at Argostoli, 
the party separated — Lord Byron and Trela'miey 
to the brig of the former lying in the offing, the 
rest to their several quarters in the town. 

During my stay of a week, Lord Bp'on made 
himself in every way social and agreeable to the 
officers of the garrison, from the young subaltern 
to the Commander-in-chief and Resident, Colonel 
N-api-er,* and became intimate and friendly with 
Dr. Heniy Muir, mine ancient friend and ally, 
with whom he con-esponded, and from whom I 
heard much of his doings and conversation. 
Colonel Napier was a man in many respects akin 
to his lordship in disposition and temperament, 
had the same overweening opinion of his own su- 
periority, the same eccentric habits of seeking no- 
tice and obseiTation by singidarity and desire to 
be interesting, and the same occasional displays 
of violence of temper. They agreed thoroughly. 

During my stay I became acquainted with 
Staff- Assistant Surgeon Kennedy and his beauti- 
ful young wife, whose name (I mean the Doctor's) 
is associated with Lord Byron's for the so-called 
religious conversations held with him in the view 
of converting him from scepticism and infidelity. 
The doctor was an extreme specimen of the class 
of both sexes who think that the pious motive 
which they assume actuates them, while it is mere 
conceit and assumption of self-importance. He 
was a veiy weak person in mind and body, igno- 
rant of the most common controversial arguments 
even on his o\vn side, but by perseverance, and 
much more by the obvious novelty and occupa- 
tion afforded to a hlase Enghsh nobleman, he 
succeeded in arranging meetings for his hearing 
Lord Byron for two hours of controversy, if he 
thought fit, for the doctor's one hour. He was a 
shallow and iU-infoiined man. His book showed 
the results ; but it did not, and coidd not, show 
the quizzing that it excited in the garrison. 

I took my leave of Lord B3Ton and his com- 
panions with much regret, receiving from him 
many cordial and flattering assurances of regard, 
and a distinct promise of a visit to me on his way 
home in the spring — a promise repeated some 
months later through his friend and relative, 
Lord Sidney Osborne, on his return from seemg 
him in Zante. 

* Afterwards General Sir Charles James Napier of 
Meanee. 



THE END. 



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